THE WEST OF H. L. DAVIS

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University Microfilms International 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 USA St. John's Road, Tyler's Green High Wycombe, Bucks, England HP10 8HR 77-18,577

POTTS, James Thompson, 1947- THE WEST OF H. L. DAVIS.

The University of Arizona, Ph.D., 1977 Literature, American

Xerox University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106 THE WEST OF H. L. DAVIS

by

James Thompson Potts

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

19 7 7 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

GRADUATE COLLEGE

I hereby recommend that this dissertation prepared under my

direction by James Thompson Potts

entitled THE WEST OF H. L. DAVIS

be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the

degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

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As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify

that we have read this dissertation and agree that it may be

presented for final defense.

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Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent on the candidate's adequate performance and defense thereof at the final oral examination. STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.

SIGNED: ACKNOWLE DGMEN TS

I wish to express my gratitude to the Chairman of my committee, Professor Arthur Kay, for his expert advice and guidance. I wish also to thank the members of my committee, Cecil Robinson, Gerald McNiece, Jack Huggins, and Lawrence Evers, for their helpful, specific suggestions.

In addition, I would like to thank my parents, Mr. and Mrs. James T. Potts, Sr., to whom this dissertation is dedicated, for their encouragement during its preparation. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT v

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION 1

The Significance of Place 1 The Essays and the Short Stories 18

II. HONEY IN THE HORN 53

III. BEULAH LAND AND HARP OF A THOUSAND STRINGS ... 81

IV. WINDS OF MORNING 113

V. THE DISTANT MUSIC 139

VI. CONCLUSION 158

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 187

iv ABSTRACT

H. L. Davis' essays, short stories, and novels pro­ vide an interpretation of the various ways in which American

Western man and the surrounding landscape may interact.

He delineates man's physical and emotional sense of place.

He offers a coherent connection between past and present by recreating in his historical novels the quintessential elements of the pioneer personality that enabled people to adjust to the gradual disappearance of the frontier. Perseverance, resiliency, and accommodation contributed substantially to the American character.

In Kettle of Fire and in his short stories Davis clarifies his feelings toward his home state, Oregon, a representative area. In his essays he humorously, satiri­ cally attacks the stupidity of those who misused nature's provisions. They failed to establish themselves so as to develop a sense of place. He is contemptuous of those townspeople who failed to recognize that generosity and flexibility were as necessary as determination and physical endurance. Davis admires those people who attune their wants to that which nature provides and who perceive all that nature makes available. He finds ennobling the ability of some who continue struggling while recognizing the meager results of their lives.

v vi

Davis' finest short stories display techniques and themes echoed and amplified in the novels. Most signifi­ cantly, he characterizes by employing humorous metaphors, exaggeration, and portraiture, and he uses natural symbolism to reflect themes. He describes how the potentially re­ warding experience of town life is stultified by vicious- ness. He creates emotional grotesques by showing how con­ tradictory character motives may result in crippling isola­ tion. He respects those who strive to achieve limited goals while suffering duress, for only then, he believes, do they realize the full significance of being human. Other stories illustrate how tests of physical and emotional strength contribute to character formation; his protagonists, bloodied and fatigued, learn the limits of their abilities.

Honey in the Horn depicts the ruin of those obsessed by money, sex, religion, or eccentricity. Yet he evokes hope by portraying an energetic, restless generation of pioneers. These people affirm Davis' belief that the every­ day tasks, complications produced by familial ties, and the difficulties presented by attempting to establish a viable relationship remain challenges which continue to add meaning to human lives.

In Beulah Land Davis depicts the punishing struggle to find an earthly eden or Beulah. His protagonists realize that Beulah Land is any of those places where one shares the struggle to survive, where one cherishes the land, and where vii kinship flourishes in the heart. In Harp of a Thousand

Strings, Davis chooses the founding and early development of

a frontier town to illustrate how European history in­

fluences American history and to suggest that various people involved in the creation of the town contributed to the

greater good of man.

The last novels, Winds of Morning and The Distant

Music:, are Davis' final, fully realized assessment. Each novel portrays individuals searching for significance within their lives. Winds of Morning contrasts a heroic Western past with a tawdry present, invigorating experiences in the open country with mediocrity and deadening routine in

the towns, and pioneer promise with modern disappointment.

Davis advises that one must adopt a tempered attitude toward

life in a nonheroic but certainly not ignoble age. In The

Distant Music ordinary people look to each other to find meaning within their lives. Davis stresses that each must experience and accept in his own way his growing inter­ dependent relationship with the land. Those who succeed

accommodate to changes in the modernizing West. CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The West has retained a national fascination throughout our history, so much so that many Americans remain unwilling to recognize its com­ plexity, its continuing life along with its power­ ful past. Yet in the West there have been, and there are, writers and scholars who won't settle for mere fantasy. They have produced solid, imaginative, Western literature based upon those powerful human experiences that transcend region without abandoning regional uniqueness. More importantly, readers all over the country are opening themselves to the real literature of the American West and, consequently, to the West itself.1

The Significance of Place

H. L. Davis is primarily a regional writer; he wrote about the settlement and development of the American West from the 1850's until the 1920's. Because historical regionalists are concerned with evoking a credible, accurate image of a certain area at a certain time, they are espe­ cially attentive to the details of the setting and milieu, that is, to developing a sense of place. We know that the most skillful Western regionalists, for example, Walter Van

Tilburg Clark, A. B. Guthrie, and Davis, are careful, as J.

Frank Dobie says, to listen for "the rhythms of their living

1. Gerald W. Haslam, ed., Western Writing (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974), p. 7.

1 2

places." 2 Dobie states that a regionalist captures this

rhythm while sitting in "wise passiveness" in order to hear

"tidings of invisible things." 3 The regionalist is not un­

like the puzzled prospector who told Frederick Russell

Burnham that "The mountains are all whispering to me. If I 4 could only understand." As artists, they strive to create order, to interpret and to understand that mystical message

that emanates from a landscape. They strive, as Lawrence

Durrell states in his Spirit of Place,

To tune in, without reverence, idly—but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling, that mysterious rapport, of identity with the ground. You can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle you'll be there.*

H. L. Davis' communication with and response to the land was not exclusively passive; he succeeds in actively communicating to his readers his responses through language.

In "The Old-Fashioned Land—Eastern Oregon" Davis confessed that he felt an inextricable bond to the land: "It is my element, which I look to because I must. The people there are my people, and the life my life . . . .Davis,

2. J. Frank Dobie, "The Writer and His Region," Southwest Review, 35 (Winter, 1950), 85. 3. Dobie, "The Writer," p. 85. 4. Dobie, "The Writer," p. 85. 5. Lawrence Durrell, Spirit of Place (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1969), p. 162. 6. H. L. Davis, "The Old-Fashioned Land—Eastern Oregon," The Frontier, 9 (March, 1929), 207. 3 because he matured in Oregon, because he experienced a variety of different occupations, such as farmer, sheep herder, cattleman, typesetter, printer's devil, derrick team driver, and deputy county sheriff, and because he possessed sharp, accurate reportorial skills as well as a keen imagina­ tion, succeeds in capturing the rhythms of the West: the changes of seasons, the beauty of nature, and the natural processes of birth, growth, death, and decay that affect all forms of life. Through his judicious selection of details he aids us in interpreting the rhythms. His emotional ties to his native region help him to capture an authenticity in setting that has provoked Philip L. Jones to claim that ". . .no photograph could capture the dynamic aspect of setting as he does with emphasis on interdependence and successional change." 7 We respond to Davis' accuracy and depth of knowl­ edge, both of which express that intellectual integrity so necessary for the regional writer, expressed in his choice of words that are honest and precise, in ideas, in fidelity to human nature, to principles, in facts reported more than g in deductions proposed. Davis convinces us because he achieves "a sympathetic understanding based on both knowl­ edge and feeling of the land's features, animate as well as

7. Phillip L. Jones, "The West of H. L. Davis," South Dakota Review, 6 (Winter, 1968-69), 81.

8. Dobie, "The Writer," p. 83. 4 inanimate." 9 Dayton Kohler finds that Davis' finest achievement is his ability to particularize aspects of life in one region:

His region is Oregon, more particularly the Columbia River Valley and the high grazing country, in the homesteading period and after; and he writes of this territory with a frontiersman's awareness of nature in all seasons and weathers. Landscape in his pages is a physical presence vividly re-created with details of sight, smell, and sound--sheep-camp meadows below the snowfields, rich river bottoms clumped with wild crabapple and blackberry thickets, Coos Bay lashed by autumn gales, a waterhole where birds and animals come to drink at first dawn, frontier towns, squalid Indian villages, steamboat ports on the Columbia, the old orchards of abandoned farms, the wet-sap freshness of a sawmill clearing, the mountains after a blizzard, and the dry, dusty sagebrush country .... always his geographical rangings are set in some clearly perceived relation­ ships to the regions which gives his work its center and its roots.-'-"

And Jones marvels at Davis' wealth of information:

He shows an intimacy with flora as extensive as that with fauna. The knowledge of both is an incredible accumulation that would excite jealousy in any natural history specialist. His mind must have been encyclopedic on the subject, but in his fiction he uses it to provide again that totality of background and a sense of awe at the abundance, durability, and variability of the life-force. The final effect is one of absolute authenticity.H

A friendly critic once told Lawrence Durrell that he writes "'as if the landscape were more important than the

9. Dobie, "The Writer," p. 84.

10. Dayton Kohler, "H. L. Davis: Writer in the West," College English, 14 (December, 1952), 133-134.

11. Jones, "The West," p. 81. characters.'" 12 Durrell responded that "If not exactly true, this is near enough the mark, for I have evolved a private notion about the importance of landscape, and I willingly admit to seeing 'characters' almost as functions of landscape." 13 Durrell's private notion points out the importance place may attain in an author's mind. He emphasizes the value of place in our literary heritage:

One last word about the sense of place; I think that not enough attention is paid to it as a purely literary criterion. What makes "big" books is surely as much to do with their site as their characters and incidents. I don't mean the books which are devoted entirely to an elucidation of a given landscape like Thoreau's Walden is. I mean ordinary novels. When they are well and truly anchored in nature they usually become classics. One can detect that quality of "bigness" in most books which are so sited from Huckleberry Finn to The Grapes of Wrath. They are tuned in to the sense of place. You could not transplant them without totally damaging their ambience and mood; any more than you could transplant Typee. This has nothing I think to do with the manners and habits of the human beings who populate them; for they exist in nature, as a function of the place.

Careful attention to place aids an author's credi­ bility and artistry in numerous other ways. Cleanth Brook and Robert Penn Warren in Understanding Fiction mention several ways in which setting can prove useful: (1) "a setting which is recognizable, and which, at the same time

12. Durrell, Spirit, p. 156.

13. Durrell, Spirit, p. 156.

14. Durrell, Spirit, p. 163. 6 is rendered vividly and memorably, tends to increase the credibility of character and action; that is, if the reader accepts the setting as real, he is more likely to accept, in a preliminary way at least, the inhabitants of the setting and their behavior"; (2) the setting can have a more direct relation to the general meaning of the story by contributing to atmosphere, and it can be symbolically related to the theme; and (3) the narrator, by his choice of details while describing the setting, can indicate significant aspects of his character.

In an essay entitled "Place in Fiction" Eudora Welty expresses her dismay at those authors who neglect place:

Place is one of the lesser angels that watch over the racing hand of Fiction, perhaps the one that gazes benignly enough from off to one side, while others, like Character, Plot, Symbolic Meaning, and so on, are doing a good deal of wind-beating about her chair, and Feeling who in my eyes carries the crown, soars highest of them all and rightly relegates Place into the shade. Nevertheless, it is about this lowlier angel that I'd like to speak mainly, perhaps, because I don't want her to leave us.16

Welty enumerates significant uses of place in fiction. She states that, first, place lends vitality to fiction.

Second, place becomes part of every fictional work's

15. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Under­ standing Fiction (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959), pp. 648-649.

16. Eudora Welty, Three Papers on Fiction (Northampton, Mass.: Metcalf, 1955), p. 1. 7

"achieved world of appearance, through which the novelist has his whole say and puts his whole case." Third, place provides the base of reference in each writer's experience and influences his point of view. Fourth, feelings are deeply bound up in place. Fifth, place "can focus the gigantic, voracious eye of genius, and bring its gaze to point. Focus then means awareness, discernment, order, clarity, insight--they are like the attributes of love."

Sixth, by focusing on the explicit, the physical texture of place, an author can strengthen his credibility: "Location is the ground-conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction that charge out from the story in its course." Seventh, an author attempts to be complete and accurate in using place because "One place comprehended 17 can make us understand other places better." Davis' work illustrates an additional way in which place may be used.

Davis embraces the concerns expressed by Brooks, Warren, and

Welty, and he focuses on place in order to preserve it. His tone is at different times mocking, humorous, sarcastic, and ironic as he castigates those who would ruin the land.

Davis draws selectively from his past as it is colored by his memory and feeling; his attachment to the land is that of a naturalist and conservationist.

17. Welty, Three Papers, pp. 1-11. 8

Davis lived from 1896 until 1960; he wrote from 1928

until 1957. As a young Northwesterner he was well aware of

the problems widespread in the literature of his region. In

Status Rerum: A Manifesto Upon the Present Condition of

Northwestern Literature Containing Near-Libelous Utterances

Upon Persons in the Public Eye (1927) , Davis and James

Stevens employed satire and hyperbole to attack dilettantes,

pseudo-artists, teachers of creative writing, and university

officials who they felt were responsible for the literary

abominations then called the literature of the American West.

The most significant aspect of this humorous essay is that it illustrates Davis' eagerness to advise malleable writers in order to rechannel the direction of Western literature.

Davis offered more specific advice in "Status Rerum

—Allegro Ma Non Troppo," a short statement published in The

Frontier in 1928. Davis calls for a vital, responsive literature, a literature of the people as well as for the people:

The Northwest is not short of writers. What it lacks is literature.

Once, instead of writers and no literature, we had a literature and no writers. There were men who made songs. Some of the songs were obscene, beastly, and possibly morally upsetting. Some of them appear to be completely ignorant of every artistic regula­ tion from Aristotle on down. All of them are quite unsalable. They are a total loss, morally, artist­ ically, and commercially. The devil of it is that they are Northwestern literature, and the moral, artistic and commercial successes are not .... 9

I don't mean that people should stop writing as they do, and write obscene hymns .... But I do mean to note that people among whom I live have remembered these old songs—and not because of their obscenity, either .... They have remembered these, and they don't even know that there are contemporary poems or recall the details of a "Western" story fifteen minutes after reading it.

They remember the literature which was composed for them, not that which was written about them. These songs talk to them of things they know and recognize tersely, without "local color" or explana­ tion. That is how all literature is made--Chaucer, and the Norse saga-men, and the Greeks wrote as these songmakers wrote: for their people. That, and not accident of scene or residence, is what ties litera­ ture to a locality. That, and nothing else, is what gives life and identity and fulfillment to a new way of life, making it into a civilization. Without it, the identity is lost and absorbed and standardized and flattened. We began here with a new way of life, new rhythms, new occupations. We have failed to make that freshness part of ourselves. ° In "Status Rerum—Allegro Ma Non Troppo" Davis underscores his regional concerns. His interest in "fresh­ ness" is similar to what George R. Stewart identifies as the regional author's attempt to derive actual substance from a location: "it will come from the particular modes of human society which happen to have been established in the region and to have made it distinctive."19 Davis called for a

18. H. L. Davis, "Status Rerum—Allegro Ma Non Troppo," The Frontier, 8 (March, 1928), 70.

19. George R. Stewart, "The Regional Approach to Literature," College English, 9 (April, 1948), 370. 10

literature that people would respond to because it spoke

directly to them. Davis' fiction incorporates basic human

concerns, including love, vengeance, maturation, and re­

birth, as well as basic structuring devices, including the quest, in order to capture broad reader interest. This part of Davis' artistic purpose is clear.

Yet one must wonder why Davis, who vehemently pro­ fesses the need for literature to be relevant, places all of his fiction in the past when fiction set in the present requires less imagination and thus speaks more directly.

Davis confronted this issue in his "Preface--A Look Around" to Kettle of Fire (1959), a collection of essays and a short story. Davis saw two past eras in the history of the West: the first era lasted from the 1840's through the 1890's, and the second began in the 1890's and disappeared with the sweeping changes which occurred in the post World War I period, that is, with the advent of contemporary times. 20

Davis praises the efforts of two men for honestly recreating the West of the 1840-1890 period: "Theodore

Roosevelt's Dakota ranching sketches and articles in the

Southwest by Frederic Remington ..." (KF, p. 16). Owen

Wister's The Virginian, Alfred Henry Lewis' Old Cattleman series and Roosevelt's The Winning of the West showed

twentieth century authors

20. H. L. Davis, Kettle of Fire (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1959) , pp. 13-17. Hereafter cited as KF. 11

where to dig and what to look for. Western writing has been dipping out of their rain barrel for at least the last fifty years. All of the books on the West have been a result, in one way or another, of what they did; not only the thousands of mediocre ones but, if there is anything that every good book is written as a revulsion against some vast accumula­ tion of tasteless and sentimental trash, the good ones as well (KF, pp. 16-17).

As the West became more densely populated after the late

1940's, a second past surfaced. Davis sets most of his fiction in a distant past, sometimes as far back as the

1850's, because he believes that in all writing

a certain layer of time and history is necessary before material becomes manageable. A man writing about what is around him has to take things too much as they come, whether they fit together into any unified impression or not. Using materials from some vanished past, the author can select more discriminately. And what he digs up and what he makes of it will be something more than a mere account of facts. It will be something drawn and colored by his own memory and feeling (KF, p. 15).

In "History, Myth, and the Western Writer," Wallace

Stegner observes that

One of the lacks, through all the newly swarming regions of the West, is that millions of Westerners, old and new, have no sense of a personal and possessed past, no sense of any continuity between the real western past which has been mythicized almost out of recognizability and a real western present that seems as cut-off and pointless as a ride on a merry-go-round that can't be stopped. 1

Neither mere nostalgia for the past nor disgust for the present are suitable responses. Although writers, including

Ned Buntline, Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Louis L'Amour, have

21. J. Golden Taylor, ed., Great Short Stories of the West (New York: Ballantine Books, 1973), p. 23. convinced many readers that stereotype characters are

accurate reflections of the Westerner, these writers are guilty of intellectual slovenliness: "It was and is im­

mensely easier to project and accept a simple West that never was than to deal with the complex reality, especially when popular literature reinforced fantasy." 22

To stress the need to connect Western past with

Western present, Stegner employs an analogy. He recalls

that as a boy whenever blizzards struck he would tie "a string of lariats from house to barn so as to make it from shelter to responsibility and back again. With personal, family, and cultural chores to do, I think we had better 2 3 rig up such a line between past and present." Davis

voiced a similar call in his "Preface--A Look Around":

The past needs to be searched through again to find out what the link is, to find out the things about the new past that the early writers ignored and the things about the old one that they overlooked and threw away. The link may be difficult to find and difficult to be sure of when it is found, but more and more people are coming to understand that it is worth trying for (KF, pp. 17-18).

Davis' fiction disproves Bernard DeVoto's claim that "the

Old West is an art form that might possibly have given us some true reports on and understanding of one segment of

American experience but that is still looking for a serious

22. Haslam, Western Writing, p. 3.

23. Taylor, Great Short Stories, p. 25. 24 novelist. And will never find one." Davis' work, in one way or another, is an attempt to provide a link between past and present for Westerners; he attempts to provide a co­ herent connection between past and present and thus to achieve order, clarity, and a sense of unity. He succeeds in making this connection by dramatizing certain character­ istics that we have come to interpret as quintessentially

American as a result of our frontier experience. He chose to dramatize many of these characteristics by illustrating the relationship that exists between Western man and the Western landscape that surrounds him. He illuminates the physical, emotional, and spiritual bonds that create in man a sense of place.

Davis chose to provide a link between past and present by focusing on the development of the West during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first thirty years of the twentieth century: Honey in the Horn

(published in 1935) is set in 1906 to 1908, Harp of a

Thousand Strings ((1947) occurs in the 1880's, Beulah Land

(1949) in the 1860's, Winds of Morning (1952) in 1926 and

1927, and in The Distant Music (1957) the action extends from 1858 until 1915.

It is significant that Davis chose this period in

American history: the period of the last frontier, its

24. Haslam, Western Writing, p. 15. 14 disappearance, and the transitional period during which

America entered the Industrial Revolution. Four historians,

Frederick Jackson Turner, Ray Allen Billington, Everett S.

Lee, and Percy H. Boynton, offer evidence which helps to clarify the significance of the closing of the frontier period in American civilization. Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier hypothesis states that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of

American settlement westward" explains American develop- 25 ment. Ray Allen Billington summarizes Turner's most significant insights:

The Europeans who founded the New World settlements in the seventeenth century and the later pioneers who were lured ever westward by the thirst for furs or cheap land or gold or adventure found themselves in an unfamiliar environment. In Europe and the East men were many and land was scarce; on the frontiers men were few and land was abundant. There the old laws governing compact societies no longer applied. Traditional techniques of production were unsuited to an environment where resources were more plentiful than manpower; in­ novation and experimentation became a way of life. Attachment to place diminished in a land where more attractive places lay ahead; mobility came to be a habit. Pinchpenny Easterners so profited by ex­ ploiting nature's abundance that their thrifty ways were outmoded; wastefulness was a natural conse­ quence. Cultural creativity lost its appeal to men burdened with the task of clearing a continent; materialism emerged as a desirable creed no less than an economic necessity. Leisure was non­ existent in frontier communities; hard work became a persistent habit. Inherited titles seemed archaic and traditional class distinctions less meaningful in a land where a man's worth to society was judged

25. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1940), p. 1. 15

by his own skills; a democratic social system with greater possibilities for upward mobility followed naturally. And, most important of all, men found that the man-land ratio on the frontier provided so much opportunity for the individual to better himself that external controls were not necessary; individualism and political democracy were en­ shrined as their ideals. These were the traits which were revitalized over and over again as the frontier moved westward, eventually creating an 25 American way of life and thought that was distinct.

Turner and Billington agree that the frontier was

the area of most rapid Americanization, that the West gave Americans continuous chances to rebuild, to be, in a sense, reborn, and that the passing of the frontier did not ends its influence on the American people and their institutions. Three centuries of pioneering had endowed them with certain traits and characteristics that were too firmly implanted to be rapidly discarded; these remain today as the principal distinguishing features of the unique civilization of the United States. Turner enumerated certain traits commonly found in the frontiersmen:

That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom ... .28

26. Ray Allen Billington, America's Frontier Heri­ tage (Hinsdale, Illinois: Dryden Press, 1966), p. 3.

27. Ray Allen Billington, The Westward Movement in the United States (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1959), p. 87.

2 8. Turner, Frontier, p. 37. 16

Everett S. Lee, one of the historians who reexamined the Turner thesis, views the westward movement as a "special case of American migration," a force which Lee believes continues to develop American civilization and shape 29 American character. The movement or migration, which is a crucial structuring principle in Davis' works as a device for artistic unification, illuminates problems which

Americans faced in the past as well as in the present: the hardships of a journey, loneliness, readjustment, the importance of community and love, and the value of expe­ rience and knowledge gained from migrational sufferings. Lee emphasized different, but no less significant, qualities in the frontier man: "In some persons individualism may manifest itself, as in Turner's frontiersman, in truculence and uncouthness, but most migrants find that a premium is placed upon the ability to adjust to new situations and new people. Nationalism, diminished respect for an heredi­ tary elite, wastefulness, a "reluctance to form deep attach- 31 ments with emotional ties and mutual obligations," prag­ matism, and "the American penchant for change for change's

29. Everett S. Lee, "The Turner Thesis Re-Examined," American Quarterly, 13 (Spring 1961), 77-87, rpt. in The West of the American People, ed. Allan G. Bogue et al. (Itasca, Illinois: F. E. Peacock, 1970), p. 21.

30. Lee, "The Turner Thesis," p. 23.

31. Lee, "The Turner Thesis," p. 24. 17 sake may be associated with our geographic mobility." 32 Lee concludes that the frontier theory may be viewed as an "as 33 yet undeveloped migration theory . . .

Another significant spokesman of the lasting effect of the frontier on the development of American civilization is Percy H. Boynton who considers the Turner thesis the

"single most exciting single idea that has ever been in- 34 jected into the study of American history":

First of all, it transformed the pioneer himself; he became a new type of American while he was making a new America. Beyond this, moreover, the new country and the new occupant of it never quite lost the effect of the experience when the frontier moved westward. Then the West became an urgent claimant upon the eastern portions of the United States. It consolidated the whole country against Indians and foreign powers, determined economic legislation, promoted democracy in operation, and contributed to the national character the elements of energy, re­ sourcefulness, and self-confidence that do most ^5 to differentiate the American from the European.

Boynton sees the contemporary farmer as heir to the hard­ ships if not the hopes of the pioneers; the frontier con- 36 tinues to influence American life.

32. Lee, "The Turner Thesis," p. 25.

33. Lee, "The Turner Thesis," p. 25

34. Percy H. Boynton, The Rediscovery of the Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), p. 6.

35. Boynton, The Rediscovery, p. 7.

36. Boynton, The Rediscovery, p. 23. 18

The Essays and the Short Stories

All of Davis' work is an attempt to evoke the quality of life on the frontier. Perhaps the most explicit, direct statements of Davis' views concerning the frontier are contained in his short fiction, essays, and sketches.

His shorter works may be divided into five distinct groups on the basis of their content: (1) the sketches offer general background information and opinions about Oregon;

(2) the Mexican adventure stories and (3) the railroad adventure stories are, for the most part, not worthy of serious consideration; (4) the stories which feature gro­ tesques focus on town life in the West, show Davis' ability to handle humorous material, and develop the theme that each person deserves compassionate treatment since isolation can be disastrous; and (5) the stories relating trials and ordeals are among his finest because they show that courage and determination were essential elements of the pioneer's personality.

Most of the Oregon background sketches are contained in Kettle of Fire, a collection of nine essdys and one short story first published in The New York Book Review, Holiday, and Northwest Review. The essays are often rambling nar­ ratives which describe the natural environment, meetings with strangers, and various impressions which when viewed together render an accurate account of the milieu in nine­ teenth and twentieth century Oregon. A relaxed, 19 conversational tone unifies the sketches. The book is a compendium of travelogue information and personal memories which Davis narrates after a return visit.

Davis says that returning to one place in Oregon triggers thoughts, memories, and feelings that create a single, unified response to the entire state:

I have tried returning from three different directions now, and touching it at any point un­ failingly brings all of it back on me, not a collection of separate localities but always as one single and indivisible experience. Everything belongs in it, and it all comes together: the gray high-country sagebrush ridges of the Great Basin where I once herded cattle, the rolling wheatlands fronting on the Columbia River to the north where I lived as a youngster, the green timbered valley country between the high Cascade Mountains and the Coast Range where I was born and grew up . . . (KF, p. 19). Davis sorts out, clarifies, and defines his varied feelings toward Oregon's past and present. In "Oregon" Davis says that the state is continually hosting groups of people who subsequently move away. Al­ though Oregon has become modified and partially modernized, the state continues to present new arrivals with a viable challenge:

The constant drifting away of second generations from this country, and the influx of new people from other states, may have something to do with its persistent sense of newness, of everything being done for the first time (KF, p. 23).

That the West offered people the possibility to start over again has been a crucial factor in its spectacular growth, and Davis emphasizes the heavy influx of people into Oregon 20 who make the state representative of this aspect of the

Western experience: "It was Oregon, all right: the place where stories begin that end somewhere else. It has no history of its own, only endings of histories from other places; it has no complete lives, only beginnings. There are worse things" (KF, p. 48). He points out that Americans were foolish to think that the state was undeveloped or un- exploited: "Oregon is not new; it is older than most of them. Its population turnover gives it an illusion of newness, that is all" (KF, p. 25). Davis feels that he must expose falsified or distorted illusions which blur

Oregon's traditions and heritage. New settlers untruthfully recreate the area's traditions by inventing or distorting tales of the past settlers. As people become attached to these stories, they gain meaning and are no less important in defining Oregon as a place:

The difference between that uncolored incident and the rip-roaring type of conventionalized fantasy is the difference between tradition and illusion. Tradition is what a country produces out of itself; illusion is what people bring into it from some­ where else. On the record, the illusions have considerably the better of it. People keep bringing them in. Those who kept the traditions keep drifting away and scattering to New York and Washington and California and places in the Middle West. Still, it will go on producing new ones, probably. It always has (KF, p. 27).

Davis continues to define his attitudes toward past and present Oregon in "Fishing Fever," "A Walk in the Woods," and "Puget Sound Country." In "Fishing Fever" Davis is not 21 so much interested in the encroachment of civilization on nature as he is interested in the examination of a quiet drama that transpires behind on of the new towns. Here a person worked for several years while clearing the land and constructing a house. The settler eventually abandoned the task and departed. His wasted work does not move Davis.

Instead, Davis values his own responses to the scene which center around his displeasure at seeing nature gradually rust and rot the settler's possessions and overgrow his house. At the same time, Davis is pleased to discover that not all of nature's reclamation serves to demean man's efforts. The trout Davis finds in the land-locked pool behind the house remind him that

Nature, instead of merely wiping out and burying man's errors of judgment, was turning some of them to use for her own purposes. Nature is more in­ genious than we sometimes imagine, and she is accustomed to working over our mistakes from having worked over plenty of her own (KF, pp. 60-61).

Davis draws a similar conclusion in "A Walk in the Woods" when he surveys an abandoned sawmill:

Closing this one mill had wiped out a community of from two or three hundred human beings. All the work they had done to bring the country from a wilderness to the production of something useful had to be written off as wasted. Not that it was all wasted, if one took a long view of it. Nature had come in again after they moved out, and was producing probably four or five times as much usable food from the abandoned clearings and stump lands as they had managed to wrest from the country with all the work they had put into it (KF, p. 77). 22

Davis firmly believes that nature, if it only is

given an opportunity by man, will reestablish itself, and

that man, if he will only recognize nature's fructifying

power, can benefit. One of the most important ideas con­

tained in Davis' work is that we fail to understand that the

land will generously provide if we become attuned to its

natural resources. The inability to see this leads to mis­

placed values and misdirected efforts and is often accom­

panied by stubbornness, ignorance, and a refusal to face

facts. Several incidents in Kettle of Fire illustrate the

point. For example, gazing in a pond leads Davis to realize

the importance of perception, and, at the same time, calling

upon his own powers of perception, he recognizes a way in

which man may learn from nature:

A parable of some kind could be worked up from looking into mountain water on a still day. At a distance, it reflects what is around it—grass, trees, sky; when you lean close, the reflection is of yourself. Lean close enough to drink from it, and you will see down past all the reflections to the reality of underwater life—bugs, worms, tad­ poles, fingerling trout, drowned weeds, sprays of reddish lichens. But the water itself, through which both reflections and reality exist, is so still and colorless that it is never really visible at all (KF, p. 72).

People need to "lean close enough to drink from it" (KF,

p. 72) to see what the natural environment offers, for the

refreshing water contains a reality only perceived by the

astute observer. 23

Davis himself illustrates the perils of failing to

look closely during an incident in which he at first judges that a man living in a shanty is too lazy to cut his fire­ wood and to keep wild animals from overrunning his property.

Davis wrongly concludes:

In the old days, homesteading in these remote areas was a sign of courage and independence and resource­ fulness. A man did it because he felt capable of standing up to Nature at her meanest, and preferred that kind of tussle to being beholden to his fellow men. Now, seemingly, it was a sign of worthless- ness; people clung to these run-down weed patches to shirk the responsibility of standing up to anything (KF, p. 74).

Davis discovers he is guilty of ignorant misjudgment when he probes beyond the appearance of the situation, and he learns that the old man is blind and cannot cut wood or chase away animals. "The Camp" also illustrates Davis' belief in the necessity of looking closely in order to perceive the land's bountifulness. When Davis, his mother, father, and step- grandfather arrive in the Cascade Mountains, they are told that there is no wildlife in the Little River area. But when, despite these warnings, Davis' family does not turn back or move to a different area, they eventually find suf­ ficient grouse, trout, and deer to fulfill their needs.

"Back to the Land—Oregon, 1907," "A Town in Eastern

Oregon," and "A Pioneer Captain" contribute valuable in­ sights concerning the quality of life on the frontier. Al­ though they are short stories, their conversational, 24

reportorial tone, anecdotal structure, and factuality align

them more closely to the topical essays. "Back to the Land

--Oregon, 1907" explores the narrator's romanticized pre­

sumptions concerning the nature of the homestead rush:

I had heard of homestead rushes before, but had never seen one. I had imagined they meant noise, excitement, competition, a thousand wagons racing each other through the sagebrush at a dead gallop. The reality knocked all that in the head. There were not a thousand wagons, but only three, so rickety that a moccasined Siwash could have knocked them to pieces. The horses wallowed through the mud an inch at a time, whimpering with weariness. Every whip-cut almost knocked them down. The people were dirty, sallow and starved. They drubbed the horses savagely, like a man chopping a knotty stick of wood. Sheets of rain slammed in their faces, and they looked glary and scared. In all three wagons were cold, half-naked children who sat and bawled monotonously, without opening their mouths.37

Davis creates mounting tension by describing the

pitiable plight of the homesteaders, those possessing a

"desperate hope" (TB, p. 154), and his growing antipathy

toward his job which requires him to print lies about this

"influx of sturdy latter-day pioneers and substantial home-

builders" (TB, p. 155). Davis is both fascinated and re­

pulsed by the homesteaders. Finally, he reaches a tenuous respect for them. A foreman explains the migratory motiva­

tion to Davis:

37. H. L. Davis, Team Bells Woke Me and Other Stories (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1953), p. 153. Hereafter cited as TB. 25

They don't run on sense, like ordinary home- steadin1. They can't, because there ain't sense to 'em. A homestead rush runs on what the old timers used to call afflatus. It's a kind of an edge, you might say, and they have to keep goin' till they get it worked off. If the roads was good now, like they was then the rushes come in '84, and '92, we'd have some land-buying' to do to git rid of 'em. They'd tough it out the full five years till they proved up. But the way it is, it'll use up all the afflatus they've got to pull through that mud. They won't have none left for anything else (TB, p. 159).

They depart before they establish themselves, develop a sense of place and belonging, or recognize the land's attributes. These homesteaders remind Davis of pack-rats in that the new settlers and the rats expend a great deal of energy in temporary schemes: the homesteaders in the process of moving, the rats in the process of moving stolen objects. Both the homesteader, who builds the house and then departs, and the rats, who supplant him in the house, had "a fury for beginning things and leaving them one-fourth done" (TB, p. 171). "Back to the Land—Oregon, 1907" repeats the lesson Davis learned in "A Walk in the Woods."

Both works stress that homesteading demands determination, a "sign of courage and independence and resourcefulness"

(KF, p. 78).

Although some settlers showed steadfast determina­ tion, Davis attacks them because their determined efforts were misdirected. The controversial "A Town in Eastern

Oregon" satirizes the townspeople of Gros Ventre, Oregon, who fail to attune their lives to the land. Davis' 26 bitterness toward the townspeople illustrates his deep emotional attachment to place. "A Town" traces historical developments in Gros Ventre from its beginnings in 1835 until 1930. It focuses on the nature of the inhabitants who prove to be as short-sighted and ignorant as some of the new settlers. The history of Gros Ventre is marked by battles--

"one long war for righteousness" (TB, p. 175)--against

Indians, peddlers, gamblers, steamboat and freighter work­ men, and prostitutes. The townspeople of Gros Ventre devise ways to purge these groups in order to preserve their self- esteem and pride under the guises of Civic Improvement,

Community Betterment, and a Spirit of Helpfulness.

The Army pacifies the local Indians as well as the tribes throughout Eastern Oregon. As a result, settlers can avoid Gros Ventre by taking any of the safe routes. By using a matter-of-fact tone, a colorful and biting metaphor, and satiric understatement, Davis humorously strips the veneer of Gros Ventre's pride:

It would seem natural if the old established citizens of the town had hated the new arrivals who came to claim a share in prey that was none of their killing. But not at all. Instead of opposing each other, they settled down as friendly as buzzards on a strychnined cow, to work on the freighters and rivermen. From that common bond they worked down to one more fundamental, namely, improving the social tone of Gros Ventre (TB, p. 182).

Their desire to rid themselves of the rowdy rivermen is almost as great as their desire to exploit the rivermen's financial assets. In the end, the townspeople miscalculate; 27 they lure railroads to Gros Ventre, but, at the same time, they destroy the freighters' market and the rivermen depart.

Similarly, when the townspeople convince their government officials to have a canal built around nearby rapids, steamboats no longer must stop at Gros Ventre. The ruffians disappear, taking with them their money. The town's attempts to exclude or repress people whom they consider undesirable but who, in fact, contribute valuable services extends to the town's handling of the prostitutes. A raid of the brothels leads to the flight of the women but also snares local citizens, including three embarrassed members of the Anti-Vice League.

Although the town is nearly insolvent, having destroyed so many of its assets, some citizens patiently wait for another opportunity. Davis attempts to uncover their motivations:

Neither profit nor propriety . . . but an instinct for fixing things over; for making the town, not what humanity at that stage needed, but what they themselves could live in most comfortably—some­ thing safe, mild and predictable. They wanted a city for home-lovers; in the midst of a country of high rollers and wild-horse-peelers; and they could only make their town feel as if it belonged to them by making it over (TB, p. 185).

"A Town" ends with references to the "desperate hope" mentioned in "Back to the Land—Oregon, 1907." After taming their land and ridding the town of objectionable in­ habitants, they find that they have eradicated the town's life-force: They tried strategems to lure back their lost population. A Chamber of Commerce expert sat in, installed a full stock of wheat-samples, pamphlets and form-letters, and succeeded, before they fired him, in fetching upon the town some hundred of indigents who straightway applied to the county for support, got it, and wrote to all their friends. Then they tried industries again, and subsidized a fruit cannery which had to shut down for lack of any fruit to can, and a sawmill which never ran because there was nothing to saw. Do these stunts sound like stupidity? They were something far more dignified and pathetic—the desperation of a people who, having whipped a wild corner of the earth into a gentility pleasing to their hearts, find that the process had stripped it of anything to live on (TB, pp. 189-190).

They "hope and endure . . . and wait for the boom which,

after every improvement heretofore, had always turned up

to save them .... Why go to some other town, where the

job of Betterment might have to be done all over again"

(TB, p. 191). "A Town" remains one of Davis1 finest short works because it successfully blends humor, sarcasm, and

irony with compassion for the suffering of those who, be­ cause of stubborn stupidity, did not recognize their town' role in the development of the West, a role that demanded

tolerance, generosity, insight, and flexibility.

The last of the Oregon background sketches to be considered here, "A Pioneer Captain," extends Davis' treat ment of the pioneer personality by focusing on a Western

leader, Jesse Applegate, who served as a "commander, 29 3 8 lawmaker, statesman-diplomat, and man of property."

Applegate impresses Davis as a prototypical civilizer.

The mass of pioneers are treated gently; they have endured and for that they merit respect. A prefatory quota­ tion presents metaphorically a note of futility and fading dreams that is later amplified:

Before a tent, near the river a violin makes lively music; in another quarter, a flute gives its mellow and melancholy notes to the still night air; which, as they float over the quiet water, seem a lament for the past rather than a hope for the future.39

The old people who momentarily cheer a politician's speech are not convinced of his sincerity or veracity while he lauds their supposedly heroic pioneering efforts; the old people know that they "really hadn't started the country on its road from a wilderness to fertility ....[instead] They had ruined half the streams . . . and all of the natural 40 grass . . . ." The wizened men and women, living out their old age "at hard work or on the charity of their 41 children," recognize the discrepancy between the grand accomplishments recited by the politician and the actual results of their laborious efforts. The politician's ignorance and insincerity fail to disturb them. They enjoy

38. H. L. Davis, "A Pioneer Captain," American Mercury, 22 (February 1931), 153.

39. Davis, "Pioneer," p. 149.

40. Davis, "Pioneer," p. 149.

41. Davis, "Pioneer," p. 150. 30 his oration "all the more, perhaps, because they hadn't done anything to earn it and because it seemed about all they were likely to get."^

Several sharp ironic disclosures at the beginning of the story foreshadow the fate of Jesse Applegate, the most admirable of the pioneer captains described. First,

Davis states that the pioneers would have been better off had they not emigrated. Secondly, the pioneers are praised for bringing civilization to Oregon when, in actuality, they journeyed to Oregon to escape civilization as they knew it in the settled East. Furthermore, they could not have brought civilization with them since they knew civilization was present in Oregon long before they arrived. Fourth, they are not "hairy-bellied diamond[s] in the rough" but 4 3 educated and articulate citizens. They do not contradict the 6migr6 politician because he stirs a wistful feeling, not unlike those feelings evoked by melancholy flute notes mentioned in the story's headnote. The music and the poli­ tician's speech remind them of "the hopes, which had carried 44 them so far and got them so little in the end."

Davis depicts his disgust when documenting the lives of pioneer leaders who possess honor, foresight, and

42. Davis, "Pioneer," p. 150.

43. Davis, "Pioneer," p. 150. '

44. Davis, "Pioneer," p. 151. 31

ability, but whose promising careers end in disarray or

disaster. Life's vicissitudes are partially responsible for

the disappointing outcomes of the leader's efforts, but so are the settlers who chose men to replace the pioneer captains on the basis of personal greed or as the party

bosses so ordered. Among those who died with frustrated ambitions were John McLoughlin, numerous Methodist churchmen,

Meriwether Lewis, William Clarke, John C. Fremont, Governor

Joseph Lane, and most importantly, Jesse Applegate.

Amid all of the ruined hopes, it is Jesse Applegate who offers a stoical, detached viewpoint, and who recognizes that manifest destiny as well as "afflatus" respect no indi­ vidual:

When the world is ready for a physical advance, the agent is found to carry it into effect; and though the physical forces have existed through all time precisely as they exist today, they remain hidden in the womb of nature until a knowledge of them is a necessity . . . . So it is with the race of pioneers. We were in our day precisely adapted, mentally and physically, to perform the part assigned us in the march of civilization, and no matter what our individual motives, we have as a^,- class well executed the purpose of our creation.

45. Davis, "Pioneer," p. 15 8. Compare Grand­ father's comment in John Steinbeck's "The Leader of the People" (Pascal Covici, ed., The Portable Steinbeck [New York: The Viking Press, 1971], p. 414): "It wasn't Indians that were important, nor adventurers, nor even getting out here. It was a bunch of people made into one big crawling beast. And I was the head. It was westering and westering. Every man wanted something for himself, but the big beast that was all of them wanted only westering. I was the leader, but if I hadn't been there, someone else would have 32

"A Pioneer Captain" is the most mature of Davis'

Oregon background sketches. Davis1 admiration for Applegate shows that he too felt that a tempered attitude toward the pioneers involves the ability to place all of their efforts in proper perspective. The pioneers described at the beginning of the story, as well as Applegate, realize their personal insignificance in the westward movement. They are not, in any sense, less significant in Davis' eyes. In fact, their ability to show continued determined effort while recognizing their disappointing situation ennobles them. As Francis E. Hodgins states, No American writer has ever been more aware than Davis of the waste involved in all pioneering—the false assumptions, blasted dreams, and defeated hopes, the erosion of human values inevitable in upheaval. He consistently deals with human beings at that point in their lives when, in his phrase, they have been "starved down" morally and spiri­ tually to their final resources. Only then in his books do they rise, somehow, to the true signifi­ cance of human being.

The pioneers, refusing to quit the struggle, exhibiting a sense of humor and tolerance toward the politician, sensi­ tive to imaginative appeals because, for the most part, they see how far short they are of the realization of their hopes, are representative of those sturdy men and women who been the head .... it wasn't getting here that mattered, it was movement and westering." Davis' story appeared seven years before "The Leader of the People."

46. Francis E. Hodgins, Jr., "The Literary Emanci­ pation of a Region," Diss. Michigan State University, 1957, p. 470. 33

brought civilization, in the form of its finest ideals to

the West.

A specific setting and an adventure story format

distinguish the second and third groups of short stories.

The Mexican stories, set in Mexico, include "Spanish Lady,"

"The Vanishing Wolf," "A Horse for Felipa," and "World of

Little Doves." They are slick stories and lack literary

merit. The third group of stories also may be grouped to­ gether because of setting and content; in this case, "Flying

Switch," "Wild Horse Siding," "Extra Gang," "Wild Headlight,"

"Shotgun Junction," and "Railroad Beef" take place at rail­ road construction or maintenance sites in the West. They are primarily escapist fare, adventure stories that display suspense, humor, and a rapid line of action.

"Wild Horse Siding" is noteworthy because it employs natural symbolism and because it incorporates the adventure- story formula of action and resolution of conflict while artfully handling a serious theme. In this story Waite

Tunison and his wife, Jenny, agree to act as caretakers of a section of railroad track while living at Mile Post 83.

Tunison has lost self-confidence due to an accident and subsequent chain of events that left him a failure in business and a jobless debtor. He accepts the railroad job because it is bleak and hopeless, a reflection of the way in which he views himself. It was "such a superbly dreary and God-forsaken hole that not even a section boss could 34 stand it more than a couple of months without turning queer or taking to drink .... There was heat in summer, mud in spring and fall, zero weather and drifting blizzards in winter, and silence all the time except when the trains 47 churned past."

Although he feels such a position is all that he deserves ("If this place had been fit for people to live in, 48 they wouldn't have give it to me," ), Jen is undaunted and begins a garden which, as it grows, symbolizes their growing ability to handle the responsibilities and adapt to the harsh, lonely surroundings. Davis uses the wild horses to represent the uncontrollable elements in their lives, especially Waite's fears and his lack of self-esteem. The power of these fears is symbolically illustrated by the fact that the J-Spear-E horse threatens Jen, trespasses onto the fenced-in land Waite is paid to protect, and, eventually, dies as a result of a collision with a train. The Super­ intendent, Buckley, views the horse's death as a negligence on Waite's part, and is about to dismiss him when the train on which he is riding becomes stranded in snow several miles from Waite's house. This event neatly brings together several elements in the story, both on the level of plot as well as on the level of complicated character development.

47. H. L. Davis, "Wild Horse Siding," Colliers, 17 October, 1931, p. 14.

48. Davis, "Siding," p. 15. 35

In order to complete the rescue, Waite must call on his

expert knowledge of horses, subdue them, and drive them to

the train. He also succeeds in subduing his fears of

failure by accomplishing the rescue. His wife's preserved

food, a product of her garden, feeds the stranded passengers.

All of which impresses Buckley, who views Waite as a skill­

ful, effectual employee:

Buckley's admonishments were finer music to Waite than all the praise and handshaking on earth. They were a sign that he was wanted, that he belonged with his job, and that it wasn't merely draped around his neck like a pair of give-away socks at a relief-station. His job wasn't a give-away any longer. It was his by conquest ....

"That garden of yours pulled us over," he said. "The reason I didn't want you to plant it was because it made the place look too good. I was afraid somebody else might take it away from me. But nobody can now. They've et too much of your cookin'. We're here to stay."

"It's a good place to be, this wild horse siding," she said. "Next year we'll have a cow and some pigs. And I won't cultivate the garden by hand any more. I won't need to, now we've got a good team of horses for it."49

Jen's final sentence unites two important symbols in the story, garden and horse, in a statement of promise that accurately reflects the accomplishments that each have made in overcoming a hostile environment and in making it pro­ ductive while gaining confidence and self-respect. In the fourth group of short works, the stories which feature grotesques, "Cow-Town Widows" and "Old Man

49. Davis, "Siding," p. 66. 36

Isbell's Wife," Davis attempts to evoke the representative

Western town. As in several of the Oregon background

sketches, most notably "A Town in Eastern Oregon," Davis is

angered by and cynical toward the stupid, destructive

settlers. Qualities of the pioneer that Frederick Jackson

Turner found widespread, such as exuberance and buoyancy,

are largely absent; instead, Davis characterizes the

frontier inhabitants as narrow-minded and cruel. Once again

a place's advantages are ignored or mishandled: the indi­

vidual's potentially rewarding experience of town life is

stultified by viciousness.

"Cow-Town Widows" and "Old Man Isbell's Wife" may be

grouped together because of similar character types and similar themes. "Cow-Town Widows" illustrates a technique

Davis uses so effectively in several of the novels, most notably in Honey in the Horn; that is, humorous metaphors

and exaggeration in character description. For example,

Bill Glisan is described as "a big, swollen-looking dullard with bluish spots on his face, who slobbered on his chin and stood rocking back and forth as if some nerve in his brain 50 were about to quit on him." Trumpeter Broyles's widow is

"built like a derrick-horse, her hands were shaped like ox­

bow stirrups, and she could easily have lifted him sitting in one palm. Stood up against her, he would have looked

50. H. L. Davis, "Cow-Town Widows," The American Mercury, December, 1929, p. 465. 37 like a mummified papoose." 51 Mrs. Glisan is "very tall and scrawny, but bulgy in the wrong places, like an old broken- mouthed ewe that has been overgrassed, and she helped out the likeness by tying up her face in an old white cotton shawl and pitched her voice to an aimless bawling mono- 52 tone." Comparing Mrs. Glisan to an animal mocks her overly-serious self-image. Another simile humorously points to her predatory nature: "Let a rancher agree with her, and 53 she was on him like a hawk nailing a bullsnake."

Davis' persona, a wry character, is credible; he impresses us with his ability to characterize in incisive strokes, to provoke laughter, to ridicule pretension, and to present a balanced view of the later pioneers by showing their humanity, including their vanity, silliness, and absurdity. He most effectively focuses on Trumpeter

Broyles:

a sawed-off dried-up old scold of a saloon-keeper, with a bright red face, white mustaches, a white lip-whisker like the pictures of Phil Sheridan, and eyebrows that bushed out as stiff as tufts of dead ticklegrass. He had fought with Sheridan's cavalry in the Civil War, and his style of whisker pruning was intended, no doubt, to commemorate his cam­ paigns. I don't know whether he had been a trumpeter or he got the name on account of his voice. It was a high jagged-edged rattle, which, when he was particularly angry, cracked into a gurgling screech. There were no modulations at all. He would

51. Davis, "Widows," p. 466.

52. Davis, "Widows," p. 465.

53. Davis, "Widows," p. 465. 38

invite a customer to have one on the house in the same tone he might have used to order an enemy to put up his hands. The people who lived neighbors to him claimed that it sounded the same when he talked to his wife, though he was merely asking her to pass the biscuits.

The most significant conflict in the story occurs after Trumpeter Broyles dies, and his widow tries to imprison Mrs. Glisan for her earlier attempts to burn

Trumpeter's saloon. After Bill Glisan murders his mother, the town decides to spurn Trumpeter's widow because of her harassment of Mrs. Glisan. Mrs. Broyles spurns them while adhering to her husband's advice. She remembers how often he railed against them for pranks played on him. Similar attempts to harass Mrs. Broyles fail: she horsewhips the

Indian women sent to ruin her garden; she plants cacti near her sidewalk, knowing that the town drunks often stumble and fall as they pass by; she feeds onions to encroaching cows so that their milk will smell like musk.

Whether the isolation is imposed by her own strict belief in her husband's self-righteous hatred of the towns­ people or by the townspeople themselves, the result is her complete ostracism. Physically monstrous, she also becomes an emotional grotesque. The boys fear and admire her for they realize she is a more intimidating and resourceful person than was her husband: "Had he seen that she had him lapped, not only in beef and bone, but in character too, and

54. Davis, "Widows," p. 464. 39 depth and tenacity of will? Yet even in us youngsters her 55 very ignorance had a majesty that we were afraid of."

Perversity pervades this story, and Davis excels in delineating contradictory character motives. For example, although she looks at the townspeople as if "they weren't worth the trouble it would take to wring their necks,"56 she suffers when part of the population departs during the summer since "there were no men for her to invent meanness 57 against . . . One is reminded of William Faulkner's

Miss Emily Grierson in "A Rose for Emily" who will not allow her father to be buried because "with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people 5 8 will." When Mrs. Broyles discovers that wild gooseberries are available in a canyon near the town, she convinces her­ self that she must pick as many gooseberries as she can, not because she wants them, but because she fears the towns­ people are taking her fair share. She kills herself while showing some town boys that she will have her portion. The townspeople are similarly perverse. When they realize that she is dying, they glare at the narrator, who is indirectly responsible for her death by his taunting, "as if I had

55. Davis, "Widows," p. 4 70.

56. Davis, "Widows," p. 468.

57. Davis, "Widows," p. 4 70.

58. Brooks and Warren, Understanding Fiction, p. 346. 40 destroyed something without which it would be impossible 59 them to live."

Mrs. Broyles's death robs the townspeople of a raison d'etre and further characterizes them as petty, fearful, and malicious. The Doctor's pronouncement that she was representative of a type of frontier woman, a cowtown widow, who misjudge their abilities and, consequently, themselves, is not convincing. The boy's tears at the story's end assuage his guilt since he accepts his responsi­ bility in the crime: "the neighbors were right to accuse me."^^ But neither he nor they realize that they also stand accused. The red gooseberry pulp, which looks like blood, is symbolic of the blame staining every person assembled in her house. That a boy is the only person to recognize his part in the cruel isolation of Mrs. Broyles accents the callousness of the supposedly mature townspeople. Her opinions formed by her husband, the story of this mean and obnoxious woman with "a mouth like a fissure in granite"^ is a powerful indictment of the dangers of group and indi­ vidual imposed isolation. Most damning, though, is Davis' characterization of the townspeople who refuse to offer compassion and understanding. The term grotesque,

59. Davis, "Widows," p. 473.

60. Davis, "Widows," p. 473.

61. Davis, "Widows," p. 467. 41

applicable at first glance only to the bizarre, ludicrous

appearances of Bill, Mrs. Glisan, Trumpeter, and Mrs.

Broyles, is, in the final view, much more suitable in de­ scribing the townspeoples' ugly behavior.

"Old Man Isbell's Wife" is closely related to "Cow-

Town Widows" in theme and characterization. Davis says that

the unnamed town in which his story is set is typical of

many Western towns and a microcosm of towns everywhere: "in those ten blocks a man could live his entire lifetime, lacking nothing, and perhaps not even missing anything.

Food, warmth, liquor, work, and women; love, avarice, fear, envy, anger, and, of a special kind, belonging to no other kind of life, joy" (TB, p. 133). Davis stresses that the town offers numerous opportunities for personal development.

But the townspeople prefer to ostracize those who violate their self-imposed sense of homogeneity. The women want

Old Man Isbell sent to an institution because "For one thing, he was not a townsman, but a member of the race which they preyed on. For another, he was eighty-five years old, slack-witted, vacant-minded, doddering, dirty, and a bore"

(TB, p. 134). At times humorous as well as repulsive, he deserves pity and understanding: "It was his palsy, no doubt, that was to blame for his unbuttoned trousers, his dangling shoestrings, and the gobs of food smeared on his clothes and through his whiskers" (TB, p. 135). He also merits respect as a pioneer: 42

He had lived his eighty-five through the most splendidly colored history that one man could ever have lived through in the world—the Civil War, the Indian campaigns in the West, the mining days, the cattle-kings, the long-line freighters, the road-agents, the stockmen's wars--the changing, with a swiftness and decision unknown to history before, of a country, of a country and its people; yes, and of a nation. Not as a spectator, either. He lived in the middle of every bit of it, and had a hand in every phase (TB, p. 135).

His wife is "the town joke .... she weighed close to three hundred pounds, being almost as broad as she was tall, and she had to shave her face regularly to keep down a coarse black beard, which showed in the wrinkles of fat where a razor could not reach" (TB, p. 139). As he does with with Old Man Isbell, Davis elicits our sympathy:

Even in that scantily-womaned place, where only the dullest girls lived after they were big enough to look out for themselves, she had never had a suitor . . . . She was so fat that to walk downtown for Old Man Isbell"s order of groceries took her almost an hour. But in spite of them all, in spite of the tittering, and the cruelty and the embarrassment, and her own exertions, she carried home the groceries every day (TB, p. 139), a detail that represents her ability to accomplish much under duress. Although Old Man Isbell's wife earns our respect, the townspeople continue to shun her and her husband while they ignore the fact that Old Man Isbell is no longer an embarrassment to the community. The other women deny her the satisfaction and pride of being recog­ nized by her peers "as an established housewife" (TB, p.

14 3) because she refuses to remain a joke, and "they took it out on her by letting her alone" (TB, p. 140). 43

Old Man Isbell could not communicate the excitement of his varied experiences during the settling of the West until his death, at which time he and his wife act out mock scenes in which he shouts commands and she obeys. When his death brings the townspeople to the Isbell home, she no longer cares whether they notice her cleanliness. Entranced by her husband's death bed memories of his accomplishments in a more heroic past era, his wife understands that his experiences were richer than any of those of the towns­ people who spurn them. Robert Bain notes that "in the Old

Man's death, both he and his equally grotesque wife achieve human dignity by transcending the 'common realities' of the townspeople."

Old Man Isbell communicates to her a deeply respon­ sive vision of the land's challenges and dangers that en­ nobles her. Her realization and participation enables her to rise above the townsmen:

She shrilled the great scenes out defiantly, as if it were her place to defend them, as if they be­ longed to her, and were better, even at second hand, than anything that any of the townspeople had ever experienced. None of their common realities had ever touched her. Beauty had not; love had not, nor even friends. In place of them, she had got an eighty-five year old dotard and the ridicule of the townspeople. Watching over the old man when he died was the one time when she had come anywhere within reach of heroism and peril and splendor; and that

62. Robert Bain, H. L. Davis (Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1974), p. 17. 44

one time, being worthy of it, she passed them all. And that one time was enough, because she knew it (TB, p. 150).

Because she finds this escape, Old Man Isbell's wife can be satisfied in her lonely isolation. She is destined

to suffer less than Mrs. Broyles. Still, both stories illustrate Davis1 contempt for callous people. Davis shows compassion toward those made grotesque by physical un-

attractiveness or mental infirmity and cruelly spurned by the community.

In contrast to the pervasive unhappiness he depicts in the towns in the stories which feature grotesques, in his fifth group of short works Davis describes a certain measure of freedom and growth in the open range and on the isolated farm. These stories, which illustrate the initiation and education of persons, are among Davis1 finest short fiction­ al achievements. They are "The Kettle of Fire," "Open

Winter," "The Stubborn Spearman," "Beach Squatter," "The

Homestead Orchard," and "The Brown Stallion." Robert Bain notes that Davis' initiation and education stories explore character "by focusing upon a single, defining event in his characters' lives and by showing the complexities that arise from that event." 6 3 The event that defines character usually takes the form of an ordeal, a test, and results in the emotional growth of a person, usually a young man. It

63. Bain, Davis, p. 17. 45 is significant to note that Davis avoids melodramatic con­ frontations between gun-slingers in the pulp novel vein.

Instead, he studies the increasing awareness and under­ standing on the part of the initiate.

Wallace Stegner states that the ordeal is often present in Western fiction: it "must go on a good while to be a true ordeal, but it cannot go on too long or it becomes excruciating .... The virtues required to survive all these testings are the 'manly' virtues of tenacity, courage, the ability to bear pain and hardship, an assured self- 64 trust, generosity, a certain magnanimity of spirit."

Stegner points out that much Western literature that cele­ brates the successful completion of the ordeal strikes many modern readers as "remote, unreal, uncontemporary, ana­ chronistic, [and] belated" because "heroism does not survive into modern literature."^ In his education stories Davis firmly opposes such a conclusion. The ordeal often leaves his protagonist bloodied and fatigued. The protagonist's completion of the test may elicit as much relief and bitterness as pride toward what he has endured, but he realizes that life involves a series of challenges that demand strength and perseverance.

64. Taylor, Great Short Stories, p. 22.

65. Taylor, Great Short Stories, p. 22. 46

Davis departs from the mainstream of modern fiction because he is a product of the West, a world which is, as

Stegner suggests, "still nascent, and therefore hopeful.

And if Davis belongs to a Western literary tradition that strikes many modern critics as "square," we should value his squareness for its alternative to despair and alienation.

Stegner emphasizes the strength of the Western alternative:

This Western naivete of strenuousness, pragmatism, meliorism, optimism, and the stiff upper lip is our tradition, such as it is. Any Western writer may ultimately be grateful to his Western up­ bringing for convincing him, beyond all chance of conversion, that man, even Modern Man, has some dignity if he will assume it, and that most lives are worth living even when they are lives of quiet desperation. The point is to do the best one can in the circumstances, not the worst. From the Western writer's square, naive point of view, the trouble with Modern Man, as he reads about him in fiction, is that Modern Man has quit. ^"7

The tale Davis recounts in "The Kettle of Fire" is a familiar one to Oregonians, having been told, retold, and modified through the years. Davis uses it to stress his belief in the value of enduring challenges. If during the years details in the story changed considerably, the nar­ rator states that the theme "didn't end with the telling and, I think, has not ended even now" (KF, p. 165). Davis1 narrator is a man who recalls that the story was first told to him when he was eleven years old by Sorefoot Capron. The

66. Wallace Stegner, "Born a Square—The Westerner's Dilemma," The Atlantic Monthly, January, 1964, p. 46.

6 7. Stegner, "Born a Square," p. 50. story details Capron's efforts to sneak past Indians who surround his camp and to return to the camp with a kettle of fire to enable them to burn their damp wood. During his search for the fire, he mistakenly kills a former bene­ factor. On his return to the camp with the fire, he dis­ covers that the Indians had departed and no danger exists.

Capron's accidental murder of his former friend and his painful trek back and forth are not in vain since he recog­ nizes that his heroic efforts were valuable in themselves as tests of his endurance and ability. He concludes that

"It's the only thing I've ever done that I got anything out of that was worth hellroom. It's the only thing 11d do over again, I believe, if I had to. Not that I'll ever get the chance" (KF, p. 189). Although Capron believes the possi­ bility no longer exists for defining one's strength, Davis' narrator refutes this notion in an incorrigibly hopeful

Western voice:

He was wrong about that, of course, Such things change in substance and setting, but they go on working in the spirit, through different and less explicit symbols, as they did through the centuries before emigrations West were ever heard of, and as they will for men too young to know about them now and for others not yet born. There will always be the fire to bring home, through the same hardships and doubts and adversities of one's life that make up the triumph of having lived it (KF, p. 189). One of Davis' most often anthologized stories is

"Open Winter." As in "The Kettle of Fire" Davis employs a journey. Pop Apling agreed to feed Ream Gervais' horses during the winter and to deliver them to Gervais' farm at springtime. After bringing the horses eighty miles from

Apling's land to Gervais' farm, Apling talks young Beech

Cartwright into herding the horses ninety additonal miles.

At first Beech vehemently rebels against Apling's desire to deliver the horses to Gervais. His original contract to take the horses to Gervais' farm fulfilled, Beech wants to abandon the horses. But Beech learns that additional responsibilities attach themselves and complicate what once seemed to him to be a simple choice. Apling reminds him that there are legal complications that threaten his security:

You and me are responsible for these horses till they're delivered to their owner, and if we turn 'em loose here to bust fences and over-run that town and starve to death in the middle of it, we'll land in the pen. It's against the law to let horses starve to death .... If you pull out of here I'll pull out right along with you, and I'll have every man in that town after you before the week's out (TB, p. 9).

These threats fail to frighten Beech. It is Apling's well- being that affects him and when sheepherders threaten Pop and him, Beech decides to return to help Pop.

The trek to town, which includes hardship and danger, is the backdrop against which Beech recognizes his own strength and manhood. Upon their arrival in town, the verdant yards along the street accent the contrasting barrenness which previously surrounded them in the Oregon desert. Beech feels rewarded for his strenuous efforts; he 49 realizes that Pop Apling's hopefulness was not futile; and he understands the value of comfort and security after seeing the sharp difference between desert and town:

There were women who hauled back their children and cautioned them not to get in the man's way, and there were boys and girls, some near Beech's own age, who watched him and stood looking after him, knowing that he had been through more than they had ever seen and not suspecting that it had taught him something that they didn't know about the things they saw everyday. None of them knew what it meant to be in a place where there were delicacies to eat and new clothes to wear and look at, and what it meant to be warm and out of the wind for a change, what it could mean merely to have water enough to pour on the ground . . . (TB, p. 32).

Significantly, Beech does not want to have anything "the

same a second time" (TB, p. 33) because that precludes the

opportunity to learn from one's immersion in the initiatory

experience.

Eli Seth Jenkins believes that through Beech the

story reveals Davis1 concept of nature as provider and

teacher. Jenkins cites as an example the incident in which

Beech accidentally discovers potatoes with long sprouts

which enable him to feed the herd. 6 8 In another incident

Beech discovers that after sunset cottonwood trees stop

drawing water, thus allowing water to seep into a hole.

Jenkins calls this a mystical repaying of his earlier good

68. Eli Seth Jenkins, "H. L. Davis: A Critical Study," Diss. University of Southern California, I960, p. 39. 50 deed in which he defended Pop. 69 This interpretation is far-fetched. The real significance of this episode lies in the fact that Beech is attuned to place and to natural pro­ cesses; he can read signs and correctly interpret them:

It wasn't important enough to do any bothering about, and yet a whole set of observed things began to draw together in his mind and form themselves into an explanation of something he had puzzled over: the fresh animal tracks he had seen around the rock sink when there wasn't any water; the rabbits going down into the gully; the cottonwoods in which the sap rose enough during the day to produce buds and got driven back at night when the frost set in. During the day, the cottonwoods had drawn the water out of the ground for them­ selves; at night they stopped drawing it, and it drained out the rocks sink for the rabbits (TB, p. 20).

In "The Homestead Orchard" two characters, Linus

Ollivant and his father, profit from educational experiences.

Old Ollivant mistrusts his son and berates him several times, his actions stemming from a past incident in which Linus accidentally shot a cattleman who threatened him. Even­ tually, the Ollivants lost their farm and orchard due to the legal ramifications of the shooting. Old Ollivant, temporarily blinded by alkali, is blind in another sense in that he cannot see Linus as anyone other than the hot-headed bumbler involved in the shooting.

Although Linus at first rejects Dee Radford's expert advice, he gains new respect for Dee's ability after he collects Linus' stray sheep. They travel to Old Ollivant's

69. Jenkins, "Davis," p. 40. 51 original farm, now vacant, and the climax of the story occurs when Linus again aims the rifle at a cattleman, this time at one who is threatening Dee. Linus, more careful than he was during the previous accidental shooting inci­ dent, makes certain beforehand that the rifle cannot fire.

It is symbolically significant that at this point Old

Ollivant regains his sight; he "came slowly . . . holding his bandage clear of one tortured eye, so he could see his way between the tangle of neglected old trees that he had set out to be a light and a beacon of horticultural expan­ sion in the sagebrush" (TB, p. 107). When Old Ollivant recognizes his son's cautious bravery, he realizes that he was wrong to mistrust him.

The most important revelations belong to Linus. He sees in nature a reflection of his own dilemma. Now more closely attuned to place, he sees nature as a rejuvenator and a teacher: the trees become a beacon in Linus1 future.

He sees a correspondence between their struggle to survive and his struggle to prove that he can be trusted:

He walked down into the orchard, thinking about that, and saw, in the scrubby tangle of old trees in bloom, something he had worked hard on that had not disappeared afterward, but had lived and developed courage to bring forth its clumps of perfect flowers, pink apricot and apple, green- white plum and white pear and cherry, through all the tangle of dead and broken and mutilated limbs that showed how hard it had been to live at all. That much of his work had not been wasted, since it had helped to bring into life a courage and patience and doggedness in putting forth such delicate beauty against all the hostility of nature and against even the imminence of death (TB, p. 111).

This last line brilliantly blends three central elements in the story, Linus' growth, his father's realization of his growth, and nature's renewing power, the last of which reflects the story's theme that a man also has the ability to renew himself by being reborn in his eyes as well as in the eyes of others. CHAPTER II

HONEY IN THE HORN

Davis' first novel, Honey in the Horn, published in

1935, won the Harper Award for 1935 and the Pulitzer Prize for 19 36. Honey in the Horn relates formative events during two years in the life of Clay Calvert, who, as the novel begins, is described as a "drip-nosed youth of about sixteen."^ Honey in the Horn is a sprawling novel that follows Clay Calvert's wanderings. Clay, the adopted son of

Uncle Preston Shively, flees from his home in the Shoestring

Valley of Southern Oregon after he smuggles an unloaded pistol to Wade Shively, Uncle Preston's son, who is in­ carcerated. Clay's flight brings him into contact with a large cast of characters who influence him in various ways and help him to define his personality as he matures. Most important of the secondary characters is Luce. Clay falls in love with her. Although they separate twice, it is clear that their final reuniting is promising because they achieve a relationship based on the truthful revelation and acceptance of their criminal pasts.

1. H. L. Davis, Honey in the Horn (New York: Avon Books, 1972), p. 21. Hereafter cited as HH.

53 54

Davis' foremost interest is in the groups of migrating people who are continually searching for sites that will reward their meager homesteading efforts. The tremendous amount of movement in the novel has led one critic, Dayton Kohler, to state that the migrants are the men and women who "make up the unsifted, drifting society of an arrested frontier. They are the backwash of a pioneer movement turned back at the edge of a continent to despoil a promised land which, as they discovered too late, already lay behind them, not ahead." 2 Kohler adds: "Holding to the illusions of their lathers, they must always be attempting a fresh start, but among them the pioneer virtues of energy and optimism have dwindled to restlessness and discontent." 3

Kohler's belief that the novel documents a futile search ignores the movement in the novel and its conclusion.

The migrants are not so naive as to believe that a promised land exists or ever did exist; their forebearers never found such a place. Davis, through his sketches of numerous, varied characters, shows successes and failures, the dream fulfilled and the dream shattered. Simultaneously, Davis strikes a hopeful chord through the energetic, restless, optimistic younger generation of pioneers. The migrants portrayed in Honey in the Horn affirm Davis' belief that

2. Kohler, "Davis," p. 134.

3. Kohler, "Davis," p. 134. 55 everyday tasks, complications produced by familial ties, and the difficulties presented by attempting to establish a viable, lasting relationship with another person remain challenges, which, as he made clear in "A Kettle of Fire," continue to add meaning and substance to human lives.

As he strives to communicate these themes, Davis evokes a sense of place and delineates several of the ways in which character and landscape may interact. For the most part, he relies on traditional techniques to evoke the spirit and flavor of the Oregon frontier in Honey in the

Horn. Yet a probing analysis of Davis' use of traditional methods reveals his personal interpretation of the frontier experience. Davis creates a sense of place in the following ways: he includes natural description; he shows how men viewed nature as a soothing, healing force, a provider, a destroyer, and a teacher; he creates brief portraits of numerous types of people who settled in the West; he employs humor to debunk romanticized preconceptions of pioneers; he employs robust, inventive language to reflect the vigorous dialect of the frontier West; and he focuses on Clay, the representative initiate, to aid the reader's understanding of pioneering as experienced by an impressionable adoles­ cent.

The most immediately recognizable aspect of Davis' technique is his use of nature. His realistic descriptions of natural scenery serve as authentic background. Through 56

Clay, Davis is able to sketch four ways of perceiving nature: nature viewed as a healing, soothing force, nature as a provider, nature as a destroyer, and nature as a teacher.

Early in the novel Clay realizes the awesome power of nature.

After watching the sheep-killing by the coyote, Clay and the other herders depart. Clay is disturbed by the deaths because they remind him of Wade Shively. But as he looks at the falling snow, his distress eases somewhat, and this incident becomes the basis for expansive thought about nature's power to recycle all forms of dead life:

When they looked back at the meadow, it had turned all white, and nobody could have told that they had ever been there. Even the dead ewe and the dead coyote were white lumps that might have been snowed- in bushes. There was an easy and reassuring feeling about knowing that they were being put out of sight so peacefully. Wildness had destroyed them; now it was getting to work to cover up the mess and all the messes it had made during all that year in the mountains. Deer crippled by cougars, wild cattle hurt fighting among themselves, hawkstruck grouse, stiff-jointed old dog-wolves waiting in some deep thicket for death to hit them and get it over with. The snow would cover them, more snow would fall and cover them deeper, and when spring came, it would melt and the freshets would carry what was left of them away. Even the bones wouldn't last, because the little wood-mice would gnaw them down to the last nub (HH, pp. 40-41).

Nearly every character in the novel believes that nature will provide for him. Characters who attune them­ selves to those foodstuffs that the land provides can sur­ vive with little effort. Although the coastal climate is harsh, Davis stresses that people settled there because

"Food could be got literally for the picking up" (HH, p. 264). There are also those who abuse nature's fruitfulness.

The novel occurs during a period of economic instability, and some characters, for example, Pringle, Ten Per Cent

Finley, and the bridge-tender, believe that one need only wait for the next boom. Instead of raising crops for sustenance, these characters want to exploit the land's societally imposed values. They ignore the land's ability to provide food for them; instead, they want to sell it as soon as its value skyrockets when the railroad arrives.

Davis condemns them by ridiculing their failure to realize the haphazard nature of their unethical and poorly conceived schemes.

Although Davis usually pictures nature as impersonal and distant, he anthropomorphizes nature at one point in order to emphasize the men's personal interpretation of nature in the form of a hurricane. Faced with the over­ whelming blinding squalls, the men try to lessen nature's amoral stature by viewing the storm as a personal attack.

Nature provides a test during which a person can define his

abilities; it is also viewed as a force which wants to

destroy a person. Each man must struggle and call upon all

of his strength to survive:

The herd . . . went into Coos Bay in the rain at a clip that almost took the town a mile down the beach with them. It was fast and desperate, and it was worth it. A man would have something to tell about when he could say that he had taken a shotgunning herd of cattle down a chute between the United States and the Pacific Ocean, herding 58

them with a pistol fast enough to outrun several thousand sea gulls. The hardest work is pleasant if it is something that a man can brag afterwards about having done. The men rode back from Coos Bay in a fierce equinoctial hurricane that almost knocked their horses flat, and they didn't mind in the least.

The hurricane, it seemed, was nature's final attempt to break them down (HH, pp. 287-288).

An additional way in which Davis employs nature is as a teacher. Clay learns from the coyote incident that he must listen to his reason. Uncle Preston feels that there is a connection between his top-heavy, untended apple trees which are in imminent danger of toppling over and destroying his house and his sons who became increasingly uncontrol­ lable due to a lack of his management during their youth.

Uncle Preston's desire to keep the trees and to rid himself of his only living son points to his perversity.

Just as Uncle Preston is deeply set in his perverse ways, so are many of the other settlers in Shoestring Valley locked into a rigid pattern of behavior. Clay's realization of this provides part of his motivation for leaving the area. Clay feels the need to grow and to develop, but the behavior of the people around him bespeaks stifled develop­ ment. Davis points this out by employing nature. Clay forms an analogy between a frost-stunted field of grass and the people in the town:

For all its gleaming thunder, meadow and mountains actually did sleep, for the frost stopped all growth in the grass and struck all life from the trees and bushes above the roots .... A mass of 59

people, separate as blades of grass set in the meadow and as firmly part of one patch of ground. Set-charactered men, hardened by the valley into shapes they could no longer break any more than the grass could break through the frost (HH, pp. 74-75).

Clay decides to heed the warning found in the analogy; his flight from the town as well as his search are convincing, organic responses to his necessary realization.

In addition to his use of natural description and nature, Davis evokes a sense of place through his creation of brief portraits of numerous types of people who settled the West. In the prefatory note Davis states that he "had originally hoped to include in the book a representative of every calling that existed in the State of Oregon during the homesteading period—1906-1908," but that he gave up that goal due to "lack of space, lack of time, and con­ sideration for readers" (HH, p. 5). Jan Harold Brunvand points out that "This note should certainly be taken, as is

Mark Twain's famous warning preceding Huckleberry Finn, as an ironic alert-signal." 4 In spite of Davis* disclaimer, he partially realizes his goal by offering numerous en­ capsulated portraits of various homesteaders who faced the same challenges while homesteading. He extends his interest in the settlers' lives and deepens the meaning of repre­ sentative anecdotal portraits in Chapter 12, in which he

4. Jan Harold Brunvand, "Honey in the Horn and 'Acres of Clams': The Regional Fiction of H. L. Davis," Western American Literature, 2 (Summer 1967) , 138. 60 shows the dreadful boredom and loneliness which can permeate a couple's lives in a remote coastal region, and in Chapter

20 in which he details "the history of one four-thousand- acre-wheat- ranch through one cycle of usefulness—its origin, how it was acquired, what the acquirers paid for it, what good it did them" (HH, p. 440). And most importantly,

Davis focuses on one couple, Clay and Luce, who are repre­ sentative migrating pioneers. Davis carries the pioneering experience to an evocative personal level while illustrating the maturation of Clay and Luce.

Davis attempts to create a complete presentation of the homesteading period through portraiture. Employing merely a few sentences to pinpoint the most colorful, and often the most humorous attributes of a character, Davis explains that the men of Shoestring Valley are similar to many of the older residents of Western communities who

"hardened" around a certain characteristic. Such people compose a representative community. Philip L. Jones com­ pares Davis' technique to that used by Twain in the middle portion of Huckleberry Finn; both

present a vast cross section of humanity—of a particularly American humanity. Herein lies the sociological aspect, the value as a social- historical novel. The reader has a feeling of wholeness, of totality. The major figures do not stand out from the sundry mass of human kind as they move and interact within it. Vividness of detail accounts for this, detail plus the frontier folk-specialty—the anecdote.^

Davis' anecdotal portraiture contains some of his liveliest prose:

There used to be plenty of communities where old residenters, merely by having looked at one another for years on end, had become as different as hen, weasel, and buzzard. But the fact that the thing was common didn't make it explain any faster, and the Shoestring settlement's case was harder because the men's characters were so entirely different and all their histories so precisely alike. They had all started even, as adventurous young men in an emigrant-train; they had gone through the same experiences getting to Oregon, had spread down to live in the same country, had done the same work, and had collogued with the same set of neighbors over the same line-up of news and business all their lives long. It looked as if they had treated the human range of superficial feelings to the same process of allotment that they used on the valley itself, whacking it off into homestead enclosures so each man could squat on a patch of his own where the others would be sure not to elbow him.

They had, of course, done no such fool thing. It was more likely merely something that had happened to them. Whatever it was, they had all come in for it, and it made both monotony and complications of character among them impossible. As far as personality went, they were each one thing, straight up and down and the same color all the way through. Grandpa Cutlack, who lived on Boone Creek nearest the mouth of the valley, ran entirely to religion, held family prayer with a club handy to keep the youngsters from playing hooky on the services, and read his Scriptures with dogged confidence that he would one day find out from them when the world was going to end. He was a short, black-eyed man with bow-legs and an awful memory for smutty expressions, which were continually slipping into his conversation in spite of him, and even into his prayers.

5. Jones, "The West," p. 78. 62

Next up the valley beyond him lived Phineas Cowan, whose inclinations, in spite of his advanced age, were lustful and lickerous. He had begotten half-breed children enough to start a good-sized town, kept squaws distributed around the country so that he could ride for two weeks without doubling his tracks a single mile or sleeping alone a single night, and was still willing to tie into any fresh one who failed to outrun him. Then came Orlando Geary, a tremendous man with a pot belly, a dull marbly eye, and a bald head so thick that getting the simplest scrap of information through it required the patience of a horse- breeder. Not having imagination enough to be afraid of anything, he was always retained to make arrests, serve legal papers, and sit up at night with dead people. He was also one of the several dozen early- day men about whom it was told that he had gone out single-handed after a bunch of horse-thieving Indians, and that he not only brought back all the horses, but also the Indian chief's liver, which he ate raw as a sort of caution to the surviving redskins not to do that again (HH, pp. 9-10).

Another prominent citizen is Peg Leg Simmons who, while

Indians plundered his house and personal property, shot his eldest son to prevent him from revealing the family's hiding place. Davis employs humorous exaggeration and anecdotes to characterize the migrants and to specify some of their motivations for joining the trek. For example,

Given Bushnell decided to accompany the group after he discovered that his wife was hiding his savings which she intended to use to escape from him. Tunis Evans and his wife are moving because she cannot tolerate harsh coastal winters which aggravate her nervous condition, the latter a result of the shock she received after shooting her husband.

Kohler correctly asserts that such portraiture adds verve to the novel: 63

As Bernard De Voto has pointed out, there is no boundary line between the real West and a land of fantasy. Stories like these, told with poker-face gravity and in a tone of garrulous reminiscence, give Honey in the Horn a proper touch of the fabulous as well as a vitality and a wild poetry unmatched in our literature since the time of Mark Twain.®

The grim, biting humor and the strangeness of the subject matter in some of the portraits link them, super­ ficially, with the grotesque short stories discussed in

Chapter I. On close examination, one can see several sig­ nificant differences in technique and thematic purpose.

First, bizarre people in the short stories, such as Mr. and

Mrs. Broyles and Old Man Isbell and his wife, were excep­

tional individuals and were socially ostracized, but in

Honey in the Horn such characters permeate the society. In

the short stories we extend sympathy to those mistreated, while in Honey in the Horn no attempt is made to evoke

sympathy since character aberrations result from not

physical but emotional peculiarities that the character

hardens around. Portraits of grotesques in Honey in the

Horn, because they are treated with brevity and jocularity,

are not meant to arouse any of the corresponding social sympathies evoked by the short stories in which the same

technique produces a different effect.

Three critics, Paul T. Bryant, Ernest Leisy, and

Francis E. Hodgins, propose different interpretations of

6. Kohler, "Davis," p. 135. 64 the artistic purpose of Davis' humor. For Bryant, Davis presents unusual, humorous characters in order to destroy some of the reader's romanticized misconceptions. He refers to this effort as Davis' attempt to present "an aggressively deromanticized account of what really happened." 7 For

Ernest Leisy, Davis' humor is praiseworthy "as a folk tale devoted to debunking the pioneers of twentieth century

Oregon as a set of stupid rowdies whose only desire was to g 'get rich quick' by spoiling the country and each other."

For Francis E. Hodgins, Davis' humor is successful in creating

A comic perspective, [and is] a device for con­ trolling his material through irony which is particularly useful to a writer so thoroughly conscious of human failing in the West throughout its history .... by mocking the false, it adds dimension to the true. By ridiculing the forms of human behavior it explores the contents of human feeling behind them.®

Each of these critics is correct, but it seems to me that

Bryant is closest to Davis' purpose. At the same time as he debunks the glorified interpretation of the Western experience, Davis reminds us that human folly and stupidity were a part of that experience and that a novelist who

7. Paul T. Bryant, "H. L. Davis: Viable Uses for the Past," Western American Literature, 3 (Spring 1968), 6.

8. Hodgins, "The Literary," p. 458.

9. Hodgins, "The Literary," pp. 458-461. 65 intends to present the human experience in its most complete terms must show the light-hearted and the trivial.

Intertwined with the anecdotes are other humorous elements: humor of phrasing or word-play, frontier folk­

lore—"bawdy, ironic, scornful of pretension, full of commonsense and democratic leveling and yet sophisticated enough ... to recognize the limitations of commonsense and

leveling," the tall-tale, the river roarer boast, the sprawling garrulity of the pointless story delivered as a

"straight-faced narrative of the most absurd circumstances," and the burlesque.

The language in Honey in the Horn contributes to its realistic credibility and to its humor. Speaking generally about Davis' language in his novels, Philip L. Jones says

that it

is a peculiarly American vernacular—vernacular but not dialect. It imitates no one. It is unconven­ tional. It adds vigor through inventiveness. This provides surprise and, thereby, increases humor. The West has traditionally been a source of new words and word usages, and creativeness of language has often been an index to the creativeness of a people. A random sampling from any Davis novel discloses this feature of his writing, conveying the sense of a boisterous, restless people, endless in variety, adept at innovation—a language embedded in, and deriving from, the accumulated lore of a society.H

10. Hodgins, "The Literary," p. 458.

11. Jones, "The West," p. 78. 66

For examples, I have selected and occasionally italicized expressions spoken by the narrator and different characters in Honey in the Horn to show how Davis employs a wide

variety of imaginative humorous expressions. Davis will use a noun as a verb as in:

There was a run-down old tollbridge station in the Shoestring Valley of Southern Oregon where Uncle Preston Shiveley had lived for fifty years, out­ lasting a wife, two sons, several plagues of grasshoppers, wheat-rust and caterpillars, a couple or three invasions of land-hunting settlers and real-estate speculators, and everybody else except the scattering of old pioneers who had cockleburred themselves onto the country at about the same time he did (HH, p. 7).

Referring to this, the opening paragi iph of the novel,

Brunvand finds that the phrases "couple or three" and "a whole lot" as well as the extended, conversationally-shaped sentences point to Davis' skillful use of native folk idiom. 12 Brunvand states that Davis' diction

throughout this book (as in most of his fiction) bristles with dialect terms like hookshop, widow- maker, track-snipe hoosier (in the sense of "greenhorn"), wickyup, hurrah's nest, jacobstaff and jockeybox (wagon terms), piddling, skally- hooting, and bushwacking, as well as with bursts of profanity which in the mouths of some characters become truly inspired.-^

He enlivens his prose with verbs used in a sur­ prising sense, as in

He was writing like the devil beatinq tanbark, his chair creaking like a walking-beam as he followed

1.2. Brunvand, "Honey," p. 140.

13. Brunvand, "Honey," p. 14 0. 67

his pen across the paper and then reached to stab it into the ink-bottle, as he explained that he was in the middle of walloping home the moral of his chapter (HH, p. 23).

Furthermore, Davis employs colorful colloquial expressions: "It was jesusly hard work . . (HH, p. 44) and "Nobody tried to argue with him, and he packed a couple of saddle-bags and went forth to call sinners to repentance, and nobody ever heard poop nor twitter of him again (HH, p. 56); incisive similes: "Ordinarily he could have out- wrestled her at even holds, but he was fagged and logy, and she kept him pinned like a hog to be ear-marked" (HBI, p.

65) or: "She put one arm across his neck and caught hold of the bed-rail and straightened it flat, holding him as one holds a rattlesnake with a stick when one has a taste for such knicknacks" (HH, p. 66) or: "when he entered the dining room, Orlando Geary heaved to his feet like a slumbering cow hit with a rock ..." (HH, p. 72); and, as Brunvand notes:

"as smooth as a cat's stem end, going like the milltails of hell, as happy as payday at an army post, as windy as politician's alley in hell";"*"^ innovative descriptive terms:

"and spat to clear his mouth of the ammoniacal whang the barn had planted in it (HH, p. 120), and "All his prospects, everything he had worked and lied and swum creeks and run his neck in peril of the law to get was knocked spang in the head" (HH, p. 121); and hyperbole:

14. Brunvand, "Honey," p. 140. when he saw Clay's new rifle on his first visit, he went down on the floor with it, took it to pieces, took measurements of the finger pressure that Clay was used to shooting with, and honed down the trigger-gear with an oil-stone to such a perfect fit that Clay could shoot it merely by thinking the hammer off cock, without any voluntary muscular action at all (HH, pp. 280-281).

In addition to these devices, the narrator's language abounds with slang, such as "to tie into" (HH, p. 10), "to lank down" (HH, p. 8), "and caught all his sheep to hellan gone" (H1H, p. 12) , and "The flare was consarned hot" (HH, p. 129).

Davis uses frontier humor, natural description, nature, and portraiture to create a sense of place. In addition to these techniques, he includes a representative initiate to explore pioneering as experienced by an impres sionable adolescent. Philip L. Jones states that three themes dominate Davis' work, the third of which relates to

Clay as well as to those short stories which reveal the educational experience of an initiate:

One: the infinite ingenuity of all forms of life in adjusting to the challenges of their environment and--concomitant with it—the all pervading influence of land upon people .... Two: Some of human kind sorts itself out, momentarily, from the web of life, because of some purpose, task, goal. Three: the purpose, task, goal, may be elusive—even unattain­ able—but individual growth, self-respect, dignity, comes with searching for it. It's the search that counts.

15. Jones, "The West," pp. 83-84. 69

Honey in the Horn is a bildungsroman which utilizes the trek to the coast and back to central Oregon as a structural device. The most significant knowledge Clay attains is that he must reveal the truth concerning his past to Luce in order that they can construct a relationship based on trust, respect, and full acceptance. Davis' epigraph contains a section from a variation of a fiddle- dance tune entitled Sugar in the Gourd:

. . . He met her in the land and he laid her on a board. And he played her up a tune called Sugar in the Gourd, Sugar in the gourd, honey in the horn, Balance to your partners, honey in the horn.

The novel illustrates that for many pioneers, honey in the horn, or riches, was unattainable because of their inept- ness or poor calculations. Clay and Luce learn, as Robert

Bain points out, that

they must "balance to their partners" in order to live in the world and to love. By balancing to each other and their society, they achieve, within human limits, the honey in the horn that eludes many, but not all, characters in the story. Davis also suggests that the men must learn to balance to another partner—to the land and its possibilities.

Davis' interpretation of balancing includes, of course, the educational experience. Against an irrational background,

Clay must learn how to function rationally. Joining the migrants does not provide an easy solution; as John Lauber points out, "It is not a reasoning movement--its essential

16. Bain, Davis, pp. 24-25. 70

irrationality is revealed when the train of emigrants from

the coast to the interior, which Clay and Luce have joined, 17 passes another bound from the interior to the coast." By

examining the constant flux, Davis was documenting a central

aspect of frontier life for the frontier was quintessen- 18 tially "a rapid shifting, ever-changing thing . . .

As the novel begins, Clay realizes that ethical

problems are most often choices between alternatives which

are each mixtures of positive and negative elements. Uncle

Preston orders Clay to smuggle an unloaded pistol to the

imprisoned Wade in order to encourage Wade to escape and to

be murdered in the attempt. Although Wade's death would

please Clay, he does not want to take indirect responsi­

bility. Clay acquiesces to Uncle Preston's demands in spite

of the fact that his reason, or intelligence, warns him not

to obey Uncle Preston.

Davis uses an exemplum to stress Clay's complicated

response to the decision-making process. Earlier that day

Clay watches a coyote draw a sheep away from the camp; the

coyote accomplishing this by staying on the sheep's inside

and forcing her to move in increasingly larger circles away

17. John Lauber, "A Western Classic: H.L. Davis' Honey in the Horn," The Western Humanities Review, 16 (Winter 1962), 85.

18. Jay C. Hubbell, South and Southwest: Literary Essays and Reminiscences (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1965), p. 272. from the security and protection of the camp. After viewing the sheep's bloody death, Clay shoots the coyote. Davis says that Clay "learned a couple or three things about the power of intelligence over instinct that stood him in hand a good many times afterward, not merely in handling animals, but in looking out for himself" (HH, p. 32). Clay is fascinated by the coyote's intelligent maneuvers which are, until he intervenes, successful. Clay is disturbed by his own intrusion into a natural predator-victim process. Clay wants to avoid any further entanglement with Wade Shiveley because he realizes that he would kill Wade if he had the opportunity. This is made clear when he understands that he symbolically murdered Wade that morning in the form of the coyote.

Despite his fears, which are certainly not ir­ rational, and his reasoning, which is based on experience and emotion, Clay agrees to smuggle the gun: "It gave him a naked back feeling of loneliness and misgiving to think how childish both their plans were and how little likely it was that things would work out as they calculated" (HH, p.

71). Uncle Preston does miscalculate; his plan for Wade's death fails. This provides the impetus for Clay's flight and his eventual understanding that he must act according to his feelings of right and wrong and that he is respon­ sible for his actions. 72

Three other incidents focus on characters whose experiences educate Clay regarding the importance of sound judgment. The first occurs in Chapter 12. While Clay flees from the hop farm because he mistakenly believes the sheriff is searching for him, he encounters a storekeeper and his wife who strike Clay as being unnecessarily stubborn and lacking judgment. Davis devotes nine and one-half pages to relating Clay's discussions with and impressions of the storekeeper's life in a secluded area a few miles from the coast. The wife displays ignorance and poor judgment when she selects an area with "wood, grass and water" and forces her husband to live there while waiting "for the country to settle up around" them (HH, p. 239). The desolate area which she chose appeals only to a few Indian settlers.

Consequently, she suffers lonely anguish and becomes un­ stable, threatening her husband, throwing his clothes out­ side, attributing imaginary statements to him, and, for the most part, spending her time locked in her room with the blinds down. The storekeeper stubbornly holds to his promise to stay. He finds relief by "exercising his powers of divination on the characters of travelers" (HH, p. 2 40).

Clay knows that the storekeeper's boasts of character insightfulness are wrong. Clay, soured by this episode, finds that flexibility is necessary in relation­ ships and that one's desires for self-satisfaction can cause great pain to another. Most importantly, he realizes that 73 virtue, here represented by the couple's remaining together in spite of their dismay, is not necessarily the most intelligent course to follow. The episode ends with Clay's thoughts that it would be better to be unattached to another person than to live a married existence as deadening as that of the storekeeper's and his wife's. This episode is more serious in intent than the briefer portraits. Davis presents a nameless, faceless representative couple whose barren lives are a result of crippling obstinacy.

In the second incident, the wagon train stops at

Dead Dog Station which has been renamed Pringleville by Mr.

Pringle who owns all of the land in the area. Pringle intends to sell all of the land to settlers for homesites, businesses, orchards, farms, and community buildings. As in the previous encounter with the storekeeper and his wife,

Clay sees that this man's stupidity, here exemplified in a greedy lack of foresight, will be his undoing. Because of the area's inaccessibility, no railroad line is likely to approach Pringleville, yet Mr. Pringle bases the success of his venture on his interpretation of a railroad magnate's fragmentary conversation with another person; Pringle says,

I ain't a man to go off half-cocked on a deal the size of this one, and I got the word of somebody that ought to know something about it. There ain't no secret to it; the man that said so before long all these people would be ridin' around on trains, or something like that. So she come right out and asked him if he was goin' to build here, and he set back and looked wise. If it hadn't been so he'd have spoke up and said so, I reckon (HH, p. 352). 74

The mocking tone of the narrator and the migrants under­ scores the futility of Mr. Pringle's hopes. At one point

Davis states "With little encouragement and no reason that anybody could see, he was spreading the new Pringleville around over enough country to accommodate a population of around thirty thousand people" (HH, p. 346).

To reinforce the biting, caustic tone, Davis, as he did in "A Town in Eastern Oregon," employs capitalized expressions to belittle ironically Pringle's vain efforts.

In Pringleville a billboard serves symbolically to fore­ shadow the fate of the town. Placed the wrong way to the wind, the sign announcing Pringleville's promising future to the world is about to collapse. Pringle uses the sign to advertise Pringleville as "the Gateway to Eastern Oregon,

Homesites on Easy Terms, Industrial Locations Free" (HH, p. 346). Mr. Pringle expends much useless effort studying and plotting locations for buildings that will never be constructed.

The fantastic nature of Mr. Pringle's vision is ridiculed when Davis muses:

There was an odd sort of feeling about looking at the long thread of white road and the great stretches of open grass clouding in the wind, and thinking that the patch on which the wool-trading Indians had their rumps was liable, maybe any minute, to rise majestically into the air and leave them sitting, wool-sacks, kids, and all, on top of an expensive new city hall. One could see from the blueprint that the entire landscape was loaded with similar possibilities. A patch of blue lobelia in a dried-up mud flat was only a temporary 75

drapery which veiled a municipal auditorium, a big sweep of blue lupin and white everlasting strained back and forth, not with the wind, but with the exertions of holding down the subterranean birth- pangs of a four caisson grain elevator and eight or nine warehouses for the packing and storage of fruit and vegetables yet to be planted (HH, p. 350).

Mr. Pringle is, in fact, guilty of the same kind of delu­ sions of which he accuses Ten Per Cent Finley who also intends to cash in on the alleged arrival of the railroad by owning a townsite; in this case Belvista will rise someday, he hopes, to replace Sorefoot. Earlier the migrants dis­ covered similar blind greediness on the part of a bridge- tender near Pringleville who plants a peach orchard, re­ gardless of the poor soil, because he intends to sell the land for a substantial profit when the boom occurs with the advent of the railroad. In each of these situations, Clay is disturbed by their blas£ attitude toward fraudulent manipulation of the land for increased property valuation:

"Something was wrong with a country where the white popula­ tion had settled not to live, but to get rich, and where they were expecting to do it by means of a swindle .... the trouble was that the fraud sounded impractical and weakminded" (HH, p. 342). Stunned by the pervasiveness of human greed, stupidity, and ineptness, these experiences force Clay to realize that, as Hodgins says, "True values are hard to come by and difficult to maintain within this chaos of illusions."19

19. Hodgins, "The Literary," p. 471. 76

The third encounter, and the most memorable, occurs in Chapter 20 when Clay is employed by Mr. and Mrs. Helm.

Mrs. Helm is robust, determined, and loving. She insists on feeding any stranger who approaches her farm. Clay realizes that she, as do many of Davis' characters, finds fulfillment while accomplishing daily tasks. He discovers that her deathbed desire to survey her farm is a rewarding review of her accomplishments during a wholly ordinary pioneer life. She recounts to Clay the personally meaning­ ful events that occurred during her farm life: the miseries and joys that stem from their attempts to eke out a living on 1,200 barren acres. Fights with Indians, the financial burden of purchase, the loneliness she endured while living on the isolated farm, cruel, but she feels, necessary, strictures against neighbors, and the efforts of her children are memories that add meaning to the land. Unlike the schemes of the bridge-tender, Mr. Pringle, and Ten Per

Cent Finley, the Helms attacked the task of homesteading with realistic insight and great vigor. As one assesses their lives in retrospect, he concludes that it is in­ significant that the land passes to another family at the deaths of the Helms. Davis, detailing the history of a representative ranch, shows that the meaning of their lives derived from the strains and the pleasures of meeting the challenges of a daily struggle to subdue the land: this was their kettle of fire. 77

Davis stresses at several places in the novel that

Clay derives meaning from his association with the group.

It is this growing realization of the value of determined efforts within the protean community of settlers that adds

a sense of direction and purpose to Clay's life. After Clay

understands the value of brotherhood, sharing, and com­

munity, he accepts Luce's criminal past while confessing his own past and uniting with her to meet the challenges of settling one of the last remaining areas of unclaimed land in the West. As Jan Brunvand states,

In Honey in the Horn, as frequently in his other fiction, H. L. Davis is giving us a character in the West searching through his own past and through the glaring realities of his present life for something meaningful to build on. Just as the boy Clay Calvert matures, the young society comes of age; and when all Westerners can see their past as clearly and truly as Clay and Luce learn to, without any romantic mist over it, they will be on the way towards something like genuine maturity in their regional culture.20

At two points in the novel, first in Chapter 15 when

Clay and Luce enter Looking Glass Valley and again in

Chapter 23, Davis shows Clay's increasing awareness in his involvement in an historic movement of people from one spot to another. In Chapter 15 he tells Luce, "Half the people in this country will be on the move like us before harvest"

(HH, pp. 304-305). They derive "dignity and strength" during the search for profitable new land (HH, p. 305).

20. Brunvand, "Honey," pp. 143-144. 78

Davis evokes the feeling of the movement, the nature of the process, and thus he captures the spirit of the times.

The second time Clay reflects upon the significance of the migratory movement he is convinced, as a result of the ordeals of the trek and the resultant bonds, of the migrant's worth:

"I wanted to settle down in one place and stay there, and then I looked over the people that had. They're all right, but they don't amount to any­ thing. These people do. If enough of 'em was to take to the roads all at once, they could stand this country on its head. You can't tell what they might do."

Nobody could tell what they might do. Once enough of them had taken to the road all at once, and they had conquered half the continent (HH, p. 508).

Through his characterization of Clay, Davis presents an alternative to the hardened lives of many of the characters in the novel, those obsessed by liquor, sex, money, religion, or individual eccentricity. In the final analysis and with its grim humor aside, most of the portrai­ ture presents failures. Brunvand concludes that

What he seems to be implying is that only a part of F. J. Turner's famous thesis applied to many who came to this particular frontier. That is, they came out to civilize the wilderness but found, instead, that they were converted to wild men; many of them remained barbarians, despoiling the land, but never really subduing it. The in­ fluence of the frontier had been too strong for these settlers to overcome.^

21. Brunvand, "Honey," p. 141. 79

Clay's growth counters the wasted lives, the ruined hopes and dreams experienced by many frustrated pioneers. As Clay affirms his belief in the effectiveness and significance of concerted efforts, Davis voices a hope for the burgeoning nation. Hodgins summarizes the novel's import:

Clay's journeys, which have taken him through many varieties of human society, have forced him to explore many levels of the human spirit as well. He had done more than look on at exhibitions of stupidity and failure; he had defined himself and thereby defined something of human destiny .... His final commitment is a moral one, for conflicting moral necessities have made the girl, Luce, the murderer of two men, just as different necessities have forced Clay himself into involuntary homicide and responsibility for a lynching. Together they have learned the relativity of human morals in changing circumstances, and learned too that behind the morals are human needs which give the morals, however ludicrous or misapplied, a certain dignity. Both of them began in flight—from the law, from society, from their own origins in human chaos and worthlessness. Both thought to find meaningful existence in an ordered society. What they accept, instead, is the heritage of their time and place: the heritage of a migratory people who, in their congenital restlessness and despite their stupidity and their illusions, are pioneers moving toward a new land and a fresh beginning. Both Clay and Luce have good reason to understand the moral conse­ quences of this moving—the violence and waste and disruption of established patterns of behavior that they have recapitulated and learned to accept in their own lives. They have learned also that beneath the ridiculous forms of human behavior lie the concrete reality of human needs, and behind all the silly illusions of these people lies the dream that fed America's westering. It is by the dream that this undeluded boy and girl have learned to measure the real worth of experience. Honey in the Horn ... is man's definition of himself amid historical forces and the upheaval of a people in the West, against the background of a clearly dramatized natural setting.22

22. Hodgins, "The Literary," pp. 472-474. CHAPTER III

BEULAH LAND AND HARP OF A THOUSAND STRINGS

Davis1 third novel, Beulah Land, was first published in 1949. Beulah Land is a sprawling panoramic novel that describes the lives of four main characters: Ewen Warne,

Sedaya Gallet, Ruhama Warne, and Askwani. Warne, hired in

1851 by the Cherokee Indians in Crow Town, North Carolina, to "guard, graze, herd, handle and market its community herd of cattle,""'' is forced to flee when he murders a male member of the Cargill family after an argument over possession of

Warne's daughter, Elison. He takes with him Ruhama, his eleven year old daughter by an Indian woman; Askwani, a thirteen year old orphan white boy employed by Warne; and

Sedaya Gallet, a Cherokee woman. They travel from Crow Town to the Tennessee River, and then by flatboat on the

Tennessee River, the Ohio River, and the Mississippi River to Natchez, by steamboat north on the Mississippi River to

Cairo, Illinois, to the Indian Territory in what is now

Oklahoma, and, finally, by wagon to Oregon. These travels allow Davis to include a variety of incidents which

1. H. L. Davis, Beulah Land (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1949), p. 1. Hereafter cited as BL.

81 illustrate the fluidity of the frontier experience in the

American West during the mid-nineteenth century.

Speculation concerning Davis' employment of the title "Beulah Land" is complex and provocative. Robert

Bain explains one of the sources Davis uses for his title is "Isaiah 62:4, where God promises the Jews that they shall not be forsaken and their land shall not be desolate. He tells the Jews 'thou shalt be called Hepzibah, and the land

Beulah, for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married . . . .'" 2

A second, and more significant source, is John

Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. In The Pilgrim's Progress

Christian and Hopeful reach Beulah after many trials and much suffering. The land of Beulah is tranquil, refreshing, and safe. It offers abundant food and drink and the oppor­ tunity for renewal of one's physical and spiritual states in preparation for the final journey through death to heaven. In terms of the allegory, Beulah is a hard-earned respite during which Christian may confidently review his life, assess his strength, and prepare himself to face death and his just reward of everlasting salvation. 3

There are several similarities between The Pilgrim's

Progress and Beulah Land. First, each emphasizes a journey,

2. Bain, Davis, p. 29.

3. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (Aylesbury, England: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 195-196. 83 a pilgrimage, to a certain place. In both works the journey is long and arduous. In Bunyan's allegory, the final destination on earth is the country of Beulah. In

Davis' novel, the final destination on earth for the protagonists turns out to be Oregon. Yet both Bunyan and

Davis stress how and why the pilgrims reached Beulah Land rather than stress it as a place.

Another similarity involves personal development.

In Bunyan's work, certain exemplary virtues are tested and developed. These virtues are essential for a Christian's survival. They include integrity, faith in God and in the efficacy of prayer, the ability to overcome doubt and despair, and preparedness. In Davis' work, certain exemplary personal qualities, including determination and the ability to use all of one's resources to overcome various hazards, are tested and developed. For Davis, the development of these qualities was necessary in order for people to survive in the West. Each work includes a realistic assessment of man's weaknesses and strengths.

Christian is not a saint: he falters and sins. But his ability to persevere and, thus, to overcome his sins, is admirable. Davis' main characters, Warne, Sedaya, Ruhama, and Askwani, are not saints either: they lie, cheat, manipulate others, and kill out of anger as well as for revenge. Yet both works are attempting to comment, in general, on the nature of man. Both reflect human nature. 84

If in Davis' novel murder strikes us as unusual, we have only to remember that the frontier was essentially lawless.

The similarities between the two works, I think, go no further. Bunyan's narrative is an allegory meant to serve as a guide for a Puritan 1 iving in the mid-seventeenth century. Davis' work is realistic fiction. Another dif­ ference involves the nature of the journey: "Like Bunyan's book, Mr. Davis* novel is the story of a pilgrimage, but his pilgrims are two young people who are looking for a terrestrial home, not a heavenly one." 4

A significant difference derives from the actual treatment of Beulah Land in each work. Bunyan describes the land of Beulah as an attainable paradise:

Whose air was very sweet and pleasant; the way lying directly through it, they solaced them­ selves there for a season. Yea, here they heard continually the singing of birds, and saw every day the flowers appear in the earth, and heard the voice of the turtle in the land. In this country the sun shineth night and day; wherefore this was beyond the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and also out of reach of Giant Despair; neither could they from this place so much as see Doubting Castle. Here they were within sight of the City Lhey were going to, also here met them some of the inhabitants thereof. For in this land the Shining Ones lAngels] commonly walked, because it was upon the borders of Heaven. In this land also the contract between the bride and the bridegroom was renewed: Yea, here, as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so did their God rejoice over them. Here they had no want of corn and wine, for in

4. Hamilton Basso, "The Great Open Spaces," The New Yorker, 4 June 1949, p. 84. 85

this place they met with abundance of what they had sought for in all their pilgrimage ....

The lyrics of the hymn entitled "Beulah Land" depict a similar paradise:

1. I've reach1d the land of corn and wine, And all its riches freely mine; 2. The Savior comes and walks with me And sweet communion here have we; 3. A sweet perfume upon the breeze Is borne from ever vernal trees, 4. The zephyrs seem to float to me, Sweet sounds of heaven's melody,

Here shines undimm'd one blissful day, For all my night has pass'd away. He gently leads me with His hand, For this is heaven's borderland. And flow'rs that never fading grow where streams of life forever flow. As angels, with the white-robed throng, Join in the sweet redemption song.

Chorus: 0 Beulah land, sweet Beulah land, As on the highest mount I stand, I look away across the sea, Where mansions are prepared for me, And view the shining glory shore, My heav'n, my home forevermore!6

In Davis' novel, Ruhama and Askwani understand that

Beulah Land is an unattainable dreamland. After talking to some Creek Indians, Askwani characterizes the Indian

Territory, which is the Beulah Land the tribes have been forced to accept:

There was nothing especially bad about it that they could call to mind. It was not much different, as

5. Bunyan, Pilgrim's, pp. 195-196.

6. Haldor Lillenas, ed., Glorious Gospel Hymns (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1931), pi 25. 86

far as they had been able to see, from places across the line in the States. Its people were easier to get along with, maybe; they took things more leisurely, for the most part, but there was no great difference. The best places were those that nobody could report on except by rumor and hearsay, places back in the hills and around head­ waters where nobody had ever been, places that still remained to hunt out and explore, maybe like the one the wild parrots had come from, or the train of bee-hunters they had met, with their pack-horses piled with honey and deer-meat. There were places still unmapped and unknown that would be like those they had passed on the road and had to hurry away from: the woods at Rock Creek and Council Grove and the Cottonwood Fork, with wild plums and cherry thickets and wild grapes, strawberries, muscadines, black haws, mulberries; turkeys, prairie-chickens, grouse, quail, meadow-larks, deer, antelope, squirrels, rabbits, bear; fish of all kinds in the creeks. In some places, people believed, there might be herds of wild horses that could be picked for racing-stock, and caves where the early-day Spaniards had hidden mule-loads of bar-silver from some lost mine. Once a Creek medicine-man had gone rummaging out through that wild country by himself, and killed a white buffalo, and he sold its pelt to a tribe of Plains Indians for a fortune, so one of the Creek squaws claimed (BL, pp. 241-242).

The white buffalo is a symbol for Beulah Land. Although

Askwani tells Ruhama that they will hunt for it after the trip "when we're all finished with everything your father left to do," on his deathbed he reminds Ruhama of his unkept promise (BL, p. 242}.

Davis does not indulge himself by depicting life in an earthly paradise. His characters not other-world oriented. Davis depicts a harsh, punishing struggle to exist because he was always conscious of the folly of some who preferred to take a romanticized view of the West as a Beulah Land. It is significant that his representative pioneers, Ruhama and Askwani, do not pine for Beulah Land.

They found survival a task so extraordinarily demanding that dreams of a paradise rarely enter their minds. In Chapter

14 Ruhama and Askwani conclude that Beulah Land is always beyond the next hill. Their assessment of Beulah Land is strikingly similar to that of Wallace Stegner in his novel entitled The Big Rock Candy Mountain. In this novel Bo

Mason kills himself after he realizes that he was born 100 years too late to exploit the riches of the West:

He was born with the itch in his bones, Elsa knew. He was always telling stories of men who had gone over the hills to some new place and found a land of Canaan, made their pile, got to be big men in the communities they fathered. But the Canaans toward which Bo's feet had turned had not lived up to their promise. People had ^ been before him. The cream, he said, was gone.

Bruce, his son, assimilates his father's experience and achieves a more realistic assessment of where one can find

Beulah Land when he, at the novel's end, realizes that it lies deep within the human heart. Beulah Land exists wherever one cherishes memories of the shared struggle to survive, where the land is familiar, and where meaningful kinship flourishes in the heart.

By the end of the novel Ruhama arrives at an under­ standing of Beulah Land as a place in the heart and a place

7. Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1973), p. 90. 88 in which she can love openly:

It was love that people were punished for hardest the Crow Town people for loving their land too much to do anything but cling to it; Sedaya for loving her people more than they were worth; Old Perrault for having loved humanity when it showed no appreciation of the favor; Maruca, for loving a dead man too much and too long and in spite of her own fear of him .... There should be a place somewhere in which people could love with­ out being shamed or frightened or exterminated for it. There must be such a place; it must be ahead, somewhere beyond the river, beyond the settlements, beyond sleep . . . (BL, p. 189).

Beulah Land is associated not only with a land of great beauty and abundant natural resources but with a place where one is free to love as she desires. It is a shared state of mind, a tolerant spirit, that Ruhama identifies as the most desirable place. At the same time, she realizes that it is "beyond the settlements, beyond sleep" (BL, p. 189) because it is not in this world. One must accept the less-than-perfect world man creates on earth.

Honey in the Horn ends as Clay and Luce continue to search for a place where they can live fulfilling lives.

Beulah Land describes the youthful searchings of another couple, but Beulah Land extends the search to its conclu­ sion. Although Davis warns that no heaven on earth can be found, he admires those who doggedly continue the search for the Beulah Land existing in the heart:

Love did hurt people. It punished and maimed them sometimes, but in the end it reached down to things worth finding out, worth keeping. The important thing was to hold out to the end, 89

to believe in love through its shifts and changes and cruelties. And the end was not an end at all, only a change. It shed and sprouted again, and went on (BL, p. 312).

The "end" referred to here is death, or more specifically,

Askwani's death. Ruhama realizes that they found a kind of

Beulah Land, that their love did not die, but only changed since it "sprouted" and "went on" in the persons of their daughters (BL, p. 312).

An analysis of the structure of the novel shows that place serves other significant roles in the novel.

There are eighteen chapters; roughly nine chapters are devoted to life in a settlement or camp, the stationary chapters, and nine chapters detail life on the journey, the movement chapters. Another approach to the structure of the novel reveals that Davis alternates stationary chapters with movement chapters:

Chapters 1, 2: Crow Town, North Carolina

3, 4, 5, 6: river travel

7, 8: Natchez, Mississippi

9: river travel

10, 11: Cairo, Illinois

12, 13, 14, 15: land travel

15, 16, 17, 18: Indian Territory, Oklahoma

18: land travel

18: Oregon 9 0

The first "group of movement chapters, 3, 4, 5, and

6, are motivated by Warne's need to flee Crow Town because he murdered a Cargill. The second, third, and fourth traveling episodes are motivated by Warne's, Ruhama's, and

Askwani's need to find secure, hospitable places to settle, first in Illinois, then in the Indian Territory, and finally in Oregon. The frequency of their moves emphasizes the fact that pioneers were willing to make new starts and to gamble because their situations were desperate and they had little to lose.

The second traveling episode is brief, described in

Chapter 9, as Ruhama, Askwani, Warne, and the infant travel to Carbondale, Illinois, via the Mississippi River and by wagon. At Carbondale Warne intends to begin life anew, Here, Davis, through his characterizations of Warne and Askwani, emphasizes cooperation and inventiveness that enable them to overcome inhospitable surroundings. Paced with a prairie swampland, Warne and Askwani must come up with a method to transform this "meek but dogged outpost of civilization" (JBL, p. 152) into a productive farmland.

Askwani and Warne cooperate to solve the problem: "Askwani's gift didn't lie in working out problems in mechanics and such things. Where he did best was in prodding Warne to work them out for him, to light on some unexpected associa­ tion that would solve and explain them all at one clatter.

It was a kind of complementary relationship between them 91

. . (BL, p. 41). By adapting abandoned road machinery

to dig drainage-ditches Warne reflects the practical,

problem-solving nature of the pioneer. The land yields,

albeit grudgingly, to a man's determined efforts; Warne

helps to transform the swamp into arable land.

Another incident, the malaria epidemic, allows

Davis to depict the cooperation and generosity of those who

share resources in the face of adversity. When Warne contracts a disease a neighbor sends two of his daughters

to aid Warne1s family. Philip L. Jones has pointed out

that "If Davis1 work is free of heroics, it is not free of

heroism .... With sardonic humor he observes his human comedy, touched now and then to admiration for the resilience g for the human spirit." Love and concern for one's neighbors

is movingly real in the novel.

The theme of the necessity for cooperation in the face of severe adversity is echoed at Warne's death. In order to help Ruhama adjust to the initial shock and

sorrow, Grandma Luttrell relates her life story which

proves that despair is futile because life continually

holds some promise: "Keeping on the move, there was always

a chance of something happening; there was always a possi­

bility left that something else still might happen to

her" (BL, p. 187).

8. Jones, "The West," p. 74. 92

At this point Askwani and Ruhama are homeless and

parentless. In order to avoid their being bound out as servants, Warne asked the other settlers to furnish the children with a wagon and provisions. This is accomplished sans fanfare so that when they are ready to depart they find

"that their heavy work-team had been replaced by a single well-broken cart horse, and the broad beamed farm wagon by a light four-wheeled spring-cart with the back hooped over and covered, and their tent and camp equipment and a food supply already installed in it, along with their smaller belongings" (BL, p. 189).

The malaria epidemic also gives Davis a chance to drive home his belief that realistic fiction often includes historical realities that the chroniclers failed to treat:

All of the old history-books abound in accounts of the perils and hardships that early settlers in the western lands had to endure in their struggle against wild beasts and savage Indians. None of the chroniclers allows more than passing mention to the danger and suffering people had to endure, both then and later, from the new land's annual epidemic of chills-and-fever, though nobody who had been through both kinds of afflic­ tion would hesitate to affirm that, of the two, the chills-and-fever was by long odds the meaner to stand. One reason the histories passed over it so lightly may have been that it was considered a problem for medical science, which had to work slowly and carefully at accumulating and studying facts before reaching any conclusions, and had to labor against the handicap of local superstitions and irresponsible assumptions. There were various writers for back-country newspapers who, without any collection of observed facts to back them up, persisted in arguing that, because malaria nev occurred except in the mosquito-season and in places 93

where mosquitoes were, the mosquitoes must be to blame for it. The task of suppressing such fantasies was a serious impediment to research into the subject, though the doctors patiently pointed out that it had no more basis than the old belief about flights of passenger-pigeons being responsible for the great yellow-fever outbreak in Philadelphia, or about Halley's Comet having spread virus-pneumonia through the Lower Mississippi Valley. They held, along with the highest English medical authorities of the day, that malaria was caused by the evaporation of stagnant water, and that the only way of preventing it was to move where water did not become stagnant, in which they were backed up by many well-attested case histories.

The settlers in the prairie country couldn't afford to move out merely on the strength of case- histories, so they stuck it out where they were, and the malaria swept in and ran itself out among them regularly every spring (BL, pp. 156-157).

References to events that actually occurred during the westward expansion increase the novel's credibility. At

Warne's death, a critical point in the novel, Davis chose to remind his readers that Ruhama and Askwani are involved in a movement of great importance in terms of the spread of American civilization:

It was the year of an Oregon emigration: one of the big ones, the people from earlier trains having sent word back that it was safe and feasible. Beyond the settled farm-country all the roads were crowded with trains of emigrant- wagons of the pattern called steamboat-wagons because each had a stovepipe stuck up through the canvas top like a smokestack. They were all heading for the assembling-grounds on the Kansas border, moving at a walk, and spaced out along the road so there was barely room between them to clear each other's dust (BL, p. 193).

Davis' employment of the cooperation theme allows

him to emphasize adaptability, determination, and 94 perseverance, each considered by Frederick Jackson Turner as basic pioneer traits. Furthermore, Ruhama's non- attachment to place is a source of her strength. As she leaves her house she is surprised to discover that she is not overwhelmed by grief:

She had supposed, from hearing the Indians talk about the cruelties of the old removals, that parting from a place she had lived in so long would be hard and harrowing, but she had no feeling about it at all. Parting from it was merely walk­ ing out across a clearing and then keeping on. She lacked the attachment to her country that the Crow Town people felt so deeply and used to so little purpose (BL, p. 25).

During the first traveling episode, on foot and via flatboat on the Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers to

Natchez, Davis uses dangers in nature to characterize essential personal qualities. Nature becomes an active, threatening presence. For example, in Chapter 3, darkness threatens to envelop and swallow them:

When the ridge finally dropped away and the trail struck into the deep woods away from the sky, it got harder. The darkness that settled down around them was so intense and searching that eyesight felt hopeless and atrophied in it. It felt as if it had substance and being; they pushed their way through it heavily, as if breathing in an element in which they could drown and be lost if they trusted themselves to it for even a second. Keeping to the old packtrail through it requires as much concentrated wariness as walking a pole across a chasm (BL, p. 26).

Chapters 13 and 14 force Ruhama and Askwani to face increasingly sinister natural scenes. In Chapter 13

Ruhama and Askwani cross a field in which are scattered six 95 headless wild turkeys. Although they eventually discover that a hawk was responsible for the decapitations, the horror of the initial shock forces them to realize that they are in an unfamiliar, hostile environment. In

Chapter 14 they continue their journey through southern

Kansas. They arrive at a barren area where they must rest.

Askwani insists that they remain there until they find a spring of fresh water as Warne had directed. It is a place populated by creatures whose very dimensions and whose behavior frightens them:

The water was in holes, mostly muddy and bad- smelling, guarded by gigantic frogs and whooping-cranes that stood as tall as a man. . . . In one place they came, unexpectedly, on the carcass of a buffalo lying in a shallow near the trail, with a ring of painted buzzards sitting around it motionless, watching it. It was as big as their cart, and the buzzards were four feet tall .... Being stared at by them was a memorable experience. Only a thoroughly dead animal could have stood it.

Beyond that was a stretch of naked ground with nothing on it except giant puff-balls. They lay scattered around the dry blackish earth looking like bleached skulls. A few miles past them . . . was the carcass of a dead prairie-wolf lying on its side in the middle of the trail. It was stiff and cold, its lips drawn back from yellowish spike- teeth, which were locked tight and covered with dried foam. There was nothing to show what had killed it. The painted buzzards1 dispassionate vigil over the buffalo-carcass had been unnerving, but a wolf lying dead without a mark, and shunned in its death by every living thing, was harder to stop thinking of. Even the cart-horse quickened his pace and forgot about stopping to rest after they had passed it (BL, pp. 224-225). 96

The ensuing events severely test Ruhama's courage.

Suffering from menstrual cramps, fatigued by the travel, and sickened by stagnant water, she faces a series of ordeals in which creatures take on menacing, bizarre postures. Her choking, groaning cart horse drags itself near the fire and dies. Prairie wolves harass her during the night, and painted buzzards stare blankly at her during the day.

The nightmarish vigil by wolves and buzzards con­ tinues for another day as each group of animals devours the dead carcass of the horse. The ordeal intensifies when millions of pigeons rush by, making the sky dark and the air acrid and foul: "a feeling of moist animal-like heat . . . choked her and turned her stomach ..." (BL, p. 233).

Ruhama does not realize the pigeons are responsible for the oppressive atmosphere. A few predatory creatures stealing by them during the night would not ordinarily frighten Ruhama and Askwani, but the spectacular number of animals, identifiable only by their red-eyes, transforms them into a hostile, repulsive force. Ruhama concludes that the place has betrayed her hopes, and she will never again have blind faith in nature's provisional character:

Everything she had depended on in the camping- place had failed her; its bright flower-meadows and tall grasses beaten to colorless pulp by the hail, the peace and restfulness of wild nature profaned and made hideous by wild nature's obscene greed and gluttony and ferocity, its remoteness and simplicity alive with stealthy noises and eyes glittering through lie dark around her (BL, pp. 238-239). 97

This episode represents a noteworthy addition to Davis'

treatment of the nature of a place. It is a significant

attempt on his part to include a complete representation by

depicting nature's fiercest hostility.

The fourth journey in Chapter 18 takes Ruhama and

Askwani from the Indian Territory to Oregon where they

eventually marry, have two daughters, and live out the remainder of their lives. Although this trip begins in

great hardship as a bitter winter storm sweeps across the

Territory, Davis spends little time describing it. Nor does

he devote much effort to describing their lives in Oregon.

In this novel Davis wanted to trace the events that occurred

to Oregonian pioneers on their way to their Beulah Land. A

later novel, The Distant Music, depicts in detail life in

Oregon for several generations of settlers.

Beulah Land is an ambitious, effective novel; Davis creates a picture of a place, the elastic American frontier

stretching from North Carolina to Oregon, during the middle

of the nineteenth century. Dale L. Morgan has high praise

for the final chapters of Beulah Land. He calls them

memorable as a picture of life in the Indian Nation before the disruption of warring forces of North and South, and underscore the whole significance of the novel as a portrayal of the lives of whites and Indians at mid-century a hundred years ago—the fusing of bloods and cultures, the attitudes that prevailed among whites and the Indians of the civilized tribes, and the whole slow, confused emergence of a new American type. This is certainly the most original contribution of Mr. Davis's novel; and for this it may be remembered longest.^

The fusion of the white man's blood, represented by

Askwani, with that of the Indian, represented by Ruhama, is central to the novel. As this process transpires, so does another process that has always been apparent in America: upward social mobility. One of Ruhama's and Askwani's daughters marries an Englishman who takes her from Horse

Heaven Flat, Oregon, to Washington, D.C. When we next see her she is described as another of the "expensive-looking ladies" (BL, p. 314) at a government social affair. Yet she still exhibits a touch of her Western wildness that mani­ fests itself in a most unladylike kick and grinning comment to a former Oregon neighbor: "Well Slickear, she said, how's this for Horse Heaven Flat?" (BL, p. 314). Beulah Land traces the movement of people from East to West and back again. The novel reflects the constant flux within our borders and, at the same time, the constant hope of social betterment that motivates Americans to this day.

Harp of a Thousand Strings appeared in 1947, twelve years after the publication of Honey in the Horn. Harp of a Thousand Strings contains a tripartite structure: Part I is called "Harbors"; Part II is called "Beyond Moonrise"; and Part III is called "Landfall." Parts I and III occur,

9. Dale L. Morgan, "Fusing Red and White Cultures," Saturday Review of Literature, 11 June 1949, p. 29. for the most part, in the Osage Country of Kansas and

Missouri on the American frontier, while Part II occurs in

France during and after the 1789 Revolution. The three parts are unified by the presence of three characters,

Commodore Robinette, Melancthon Crawford, and the Indian

Jory, who are old men as the novel opens. In Parts II and

III the plot moves chronologically, describing their night in a warehouse in Tripoli in 18 01 while American warships bombard the harbor. There they meet Tallien, a leader during the French Revolution but now a minor official.

Part III describes Robinette's and Jory's reuniting, their reuniting with Crawford, and the town they help to build from an isolated settlement.

Davis clearly states his purpose on the first page of the novel: he intends to show how certain events and certain characters who participated in the French Revolu­ tion affected, albeit in a circuitous manner, the American frontier. He believes that some historians erroneously judge American history as shallow because they do not trace events back far enough. Davis will prove that American history, exemplified in the seemingly trivial and insignifi­ cant founding of a frontier town, is intricately related to the history of Europe. By accomplishing this, Davis achieves renewed respect for American history. At the same time, Davis supports his belief that all humanity is related. All of his works touch on themes that, however 100 personal, are also universal because they illuminate human experience:

A man can derive a certain ill-natured pleasure from tallying up the number of Old World writers who have noted America's shallowness of background in human history, and then considering how many of the human histories they long ago wrote off as ended did not end at all, but merely shifted from places like the Loire and Isar and Tweed and Tagus to new settings along the Platte and French Broad and Orinoco, there to continue through their dips, spurs, angles, crises, amendments, reconcilia­ tions and backslidings exactly as they had been doing from their beginnings, only with less self- consciousness and mostly less tragically ....

There were others whose stories, instead of being incubated in the Old World and matured in the New, crisscrossed back and forth from one to the other: Garibaldi, Talleyrand, Lafayette, Thomas Paine, the Mexican dramatist Ruiz de Alarcon, the Venezuelan General Miranda, John Paul Jones, Benjamin Franklin—there are hundreds more. Old Melancthon Crawford, upon whose later years this story is to begin and end, was one of them, having run away from a respectable Christian home in Pennsylvania to follow the sea which, after escaping from captivity among the Tripolitan pirates and seeing merchant service in West African waters and the Gulf, he abandoned to engage in wagon- freighting across the Alleghenies into Tennessee and Ohio, giving that up later in favor of flat- boating, and winding up as an Indian trader and one of three founders of a thriving town out on the margin of the prairie bordering the Osage country beyond the Mississippi. "

In Harp of a Thousand Strings Davis uncovers the reasons why a certain town on the frontier ever existed.

Some plot summary will help to make the reasons clear. The middle section, which covers over 300 pages in this 438 page

10. H. L. Davis, Harp of a Thousand Strings (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1947), pp. 3-5. Hereafter cited as HTS. 101 work, told from an omniscient point of view, relates important events in the life of Jean Lambert Tallien (1769-

1820) who was a leader during the Revolution. Tallien meets

Robinette, Crawford, and Jory in a waterfront warehouse in

Tripoli during the bombardment. He admits that he was obsessed, at different stages during his rise to power, by ambition, love, and vengeance. He ruthlessly used others in order that he might gain more and more power. He used his power to wreak vengeance on his enemies. He sacrificed others' lives, most notably Anne-Joseph Theroigne, once his companion and accomplice, to win the love of Th^rese

Cabarrus de Fontenay, who becomes his wife but who later leaves him for a wealthy banker. Now an unimportant government functionary, Tallien must live with the onus of his decisions.

Madame Tallien is also present during Tallien's long description of his part in the Revolution. She is most deeply affected by Tallien's decisions; it was for her, after all, that he sacrificed so many others' lives.

Madame Tallien helps to make the connection between the events related in the warehouse and the founding of a town on the American frontier. She feels guilty because of the lost lives. She impresses on the men her hope that some greater good will result. The pistols and knive which she gives them bear a hand-in-flower insignia that symbolize her hope. She states: "There are so many of what you call 102 these accidental casualties from the past, so many lives lost, so many broken" (HST, p. 379). Speaking of Tallien, she says,

He is harmless now; we mean no more to him than a good word on his dossier. But I keep thinking how many there are like that, and what they were once, and that there are those dead back of them. I keep thinking they represent what it has cost to keep me alive. What have I done that is worth it? There is so much more to make up for than I had thought, so much lost . . . (HTS, p. 380).

As she gives them the pistol case she adds "We all have losses to make up, all four of us together. I will remember yours, and that you were not afraid to start, even from a place like this, and after imprisonment, and against dangers" (HST, p. 380). Madame Tallien hopes that Crawford,

Jory, and Robinette can help her ease her conscience by bringing about some good that will counter-balance the destruction for which she is responsible.

Madame Tallien introduces the moral issue that pervades the novel, for each of the principal characters, including Tallien, Crawford, Robinette, and Jory, in addition to Madame Tallien, is troubled by his crimes.

Each character is distressed by the ways in which he used and abused others. Riley Hughes emphasizes the novel's moral themes:

Partly it is a parable on the uses of power, on the fact that chief of all things men use is other men. . . . Each, then, represents, in varying ways, the cost it all has been to another. 103

. . . Tallien's decision, with its gray mixture of motives, to rescue the countess was no final thing; it merely brought about other choices. When he is faced with what seems to him the most anarchic choice of all, when his enemy the young marquis elects death . . . Tallien must momentarily learn that right will is the chief harmony of order. Choice becomes a link with meditation; action adds a line to the pattern undiscerned and all but undiscernible. -1-

It would be easy to damn each of the principal characters for the suffering and destruction they caused, but Davis chose to adopt a more tolerant, understanding attitude. His epigraph, a statement from an 1840 Revival

Sermon, supports this conclusion. A preacher exhorts his audience by questioning them about the significance of spirit:

I hain't agwine to prenotify you, brethren and sisters, wharabouts the chapter and verses air than I take my text from, excepting to rectificate that it is somewhar atwixt the leds of the scripters, and if you will sarch tharin you will find a place whar it reads, And he played on a harp of a thousand strings, the spirrits of just men made perfict. Now my first pint, brethren and sisters, is what air we to take for the signification of that thar word, spirrits?

When he refers to God's playing on a harp of a thousand strings the spirits of just men made perfect the preacher envisions a world in which men are no longer sinners. Since no such world exists, the preacher is correct to focus on the spirit of man which he knows must be informed and guided. Davis sounds this note of promise in the epigraph

11. Riley Hughes, "More Books of the Week," The Commonweal, 23 January 1948, p. 379. 104 and pursues it throughout the novel. He chose the birth and the development of a town in the American West during the frontier period to show the interrelationship shared by

European and American history and to suggest that there are some reasons to believe that various people involved in this town's birth (Madame Tallien, Crawford, Robinette, and Jory) contributed to the greater good of man. The joint decision to name the town after Madame de Fontenay creates a bond among them, and, consequently, connects their lives with the lives of those generations who live

there in the future. It is appropriate that the American western frontier

is the setting for a drama illustrating the improvement, at least, if not the perfection, of man's spirit, because

Davis' West often represents hopefulness and vigorous

possibility. This idea is emphasized through the charac­ terization of Melancthon Crawford in Chapter I. A bold

eccentric, Crawford is similar to such characters as Grandma

Luttrell in Beulah Land, the narrator of "Kettle of Fire,"

and Old Man Isbell in "Old Man Isbell's Wife," because he, like them, once acted heroically and that experience

altered him for the remainder of his life. His heroism,

like that of the others, distinctly separated him from the

mass of ordinary people. Crawford risked his life, killed two Indian women, ate a dog, and hid inside a horse's

carcass while returning to his home town to warn citizens of an imminent threat by hostile Indians. During that trip

he promises God that if he returns safely he will stop

selling whisky and guns to the Indians and "spend the rest

of his days in works of piety and devotion" (HTS, p. 6).

He saves the townspeople, and then wanders over the country­

side while relating his adventure, reciting Scriptures, and

giving away sections of his land. His relatives in the

Eastern states, in order to stop him from giving away his

land, have him declared mentally incompetent. Yet their

most distressing action is to put him in a rest home in the

East. Crawford did not dispute their accusations of mental

incompetency, but he fiercely fights when they force him to

board a stagecoach that is to take him to the rest home. He reacts in this manner because he believes the East repre­

sents death; it is a place where he will be tranquillized

into submissiveness. Davis makes this point while describ­

ing Crawford's efforts to resist:

He continued to fight after the stage had whipped up and was bearing him away, and the last sight the town had of him was one of his bare feet . . . which he held locked on the side-brace to keep from being dragged in the final two or three inches. He was still holding firm with it when the stage moved past the last house and turned into the prairie, pointing for the Mississippi and the old men's home and the drowsy syrups of the East (HTS, p. 11).

Crawford's efforts to resist his extradition to the East

illustrate his spirit, which is, in the finest tradition of

the pioneer, headstrong, determined, unyielding. 106

The idea of the West as a place of redemption, re­ birth, or rejuvenation echoes the thematic concerns of each of the other four novels. In other ways, too, Harp of a

Thousand Strings is similar to Davis* other works. This is especially true in reference to technique. For example,

Davis employs nature and natural descriptive details to emphasize points. His deliberate, careful use of a stream and plants helps him to stress his belief that people often are ignorant of the reasons they act in a certain manner, yet they should not conclude that what they have done is necessarily meaningless. The seemingly random meandering of the streams of history and life are, from Davis' detached, distant perspective, not directionless:

In the story's long gathering, only that much of them remains; it keeps no more of what they were and the ways in which they differed from each other than a stream does of the waterside bushes uprooted and carried down by a spring freshet, to be leached apart and dissolved back into its waters after the floods are over. Sometimes a stray bush may impede or even turn the stream into a new channel; but the distant reaches show nothing of it except a darken­ ing of color and a little bitterness from the dis­ integration of roots and bark and body, maybe to enrich the earth somewhere else for an accidental seedling swept past to some new rooting-place downstream. Nobody can say for sure why it should have been the countess' accidental seedling that was swept past all the others to take new life from the stream in which they remained on! is a dark tinge and a bitter taste; or why youny Crawford and the Indian and Commodore Robinette should have been the instruments by which new permanence was given her; or why they should have picked her to remember out of so many, and after so many years, and in the midst of their own defeat and tribula­ tion. In the end, they were not able to decide 107

about it for sure themselves; at the very last, few men ever are. At the very last, only the story itself can cast back with any sureness over the ground it has traversed in reaching the place where, for the men who have given any part of their lives to it, it ends (HTS, pp. 352-353).

Behind a sardonic front we find an optimistic Davis who uncovers a reason for hope during one of mankind's most dismal eras, the bloody French Revolution. He concludes that each individual's contribution is necessary for the overall advancement of mankind. Davis1 meliorism is, according to Philip L. Jones, one of his most significant themes: "some of human kind sorts itself out, momentarily, from the web of life, because of some purpose, task, goal and the purpose, task, goal, may be elusive—even un­ attainable—but individual growth, self-respect, dignity, 12 comes from searching for it. It's the search that counts."

Davis uses nature as a symbol to extend his thematic concerns in the concluding section, Part III, entitled

"Landfall." One landfall, that is, the area reached after a voyage or search, is the frontier town in which Crawford,

Robinette, and Jory settle and lead productive lives.

Another landfall is the graveyard which finally claims them. Again, nature symbolizes continued growth. The tangled bushes that swarm over their graves reunites the men, and the seedling references are echoes of earlier references to new life. The spirit referred to is that of

12. Jones, "The West," p. 84. 108

Madame de Fontenay who, while refusing to despair, voiced a hope that some effort on her part would reach fruition. No doubt she would be surprised to learn how and where her seedlinj had taken root:

It was for Th^rese Cabarrus de Fontenay that the three ageing exiles from their lost past, murderer and whoremaster and thief, named their town. Except for the name, it was not much different from the other prairie settlements of the time. It is not much different from them now that the graves of the three men who found and built and named it are fallen in and . . . deeply overgrown . . . . Their reasons for giving it her name are moldered away and lost with them, but the name remains, and remains hers: a witness of one seedling torn out by the floods that struck root again after them and lasted on; a witness of some spirit that she held to even through the long night of having her account of death and injury recited back to her over the gibberings of the insane woman who had been lost that she might live. Even from those shameful and bitter hours, something lasted and took hold on the earth and in life. If its old meanings are forgotten and new ones risen one after another to replace them, she would not have wanted it otherwise. Things change because they continue to live. It was not of living that she was ever afraid (HTS, pp. 437-438).

An additional way in which Davis employs nature to signify possibility concerns the town which is founded near a spring, a life-giving source. And the new vegetation sprouting from their original settlement, a trading-post, symbolizes the cyclic process which continuously brings forth new life:

The old trading-post stood on a swell of prairie above the big spring, with a gnarled little thicket of jack-oak and willow and wild plum marking the point a little below the crest where the highest water broke from the ground. The weather had not 109

treated it too well during its years of disuse, but enough of it was left so that they could see what it had been: the lever-press that had been used for baling hides was fallen apart, but the sod-and- wattle horse-corral still held up, with young shoots of the bois d•arc saplings that had been its original framework protruding clusters of white blossoms out to avoid touching the coarse earth of the wall from which they drew life and beauty. The log storehouse had lost part of its roof, but the walls were straight and uncrumbled; the seven boulders that had been piled together for an out­ door cooking-place were scattered and overgrown by a clump of wild rosebush, but not one of them was missing (HTS, pp. 23-24).

The use of nature enables him to illustrate a recurrent idea in his works that stresses nature's provi­ sional quality. As Robinette and Jory flee Spanish and

American authorities, Davis points out the variety of ways in which they can nourish themselves if they attune their needs to what nature provides:

They can lash the knife into the split end of a pole and gig fish with it by the light of pitch knot. They can hunt for overcup acorns, and last year's hazel-nuts and hickory-nuts in squirrels' nests, and for wild blackberries and black haws and wild grapes and muscadines in the river bottoms, and for crawfish and mussels in the shallows. They can line bees when there are any, and smoke out their nest and fill up on wild honey, and be colicked by it too hard to want anything to eat for a week afterward. They can pick wild plums, and crack the stones and use the kernels to bait traps for quail and wild turkeys. They can find a mountain-lion's hunting stand, and, when he has struck a deer, scare him off and appropriate the carcass for themselves. They can eat stump-cauliflower, watercress, turtle- eggs, and the inner bark of cottonwood (HST, p. 424), 110

Davis celebrates nature with the same degree of vibrancy exhibited in earlier works. His descriptions of nature at the beginning of Part III in Chapter 14 immerse the reader in a lush new world while the fresh language marks a sharp contrast with the plodding prose which he uses to relate events in Part II:

The sights of the new continent centered in the great river, the open sky that appeared to dip down to it at either end, and the limitless sweep of prairie between them. Against their enormous planes of light, details of color lost identity, but there were colors when the eye narrowed to them: black-green of stone-cedars and cypress, white-green of cottonwoods and canebrake, red- green of oaks and red willow, blue-green of magnolia and Arkansas coffee-bush ....

Smells, tastes and sounds were of a character suitable for such a setting. The smells were of swamp-water, sun on black mud, fennel, wild cherry, mock-orange, basswood in flower .... The tastes were sassafras-buds, cottonwood bark, wild plums, bee-tree honey, bear's grease, wild turkey .... The sounds were of wind through that extent of grass, wild turkeys quirking, grouse drumming, the whistle of quail, clatter of blackbirds . . . (HTS, pp. 385-386).

In addition to the use of nature, Davis turns to several other previously employed techniques to evoke the flavor of life on the frontier, but since the action in

America accounts for only a little over one-fourth of the novel's plot, these elements are treated briefly. For example, Davis uses humorous portraiture and tall tales while describing Melancthon Crawford's escape from Indians.

In one instance Davis compares Crawford's haphazard trips to preach to those of a man whose behavior was equally Ill eccentric. The townspeople think that Crawford intended

"to find his end by walking it down, like the aged mountain hunter who, being feeble and rheumaticky and near blind, strapped himself to a yoke oi his hounds and turned them loose to track out his final resting-place, which they did by breaking into a run and dragging him around a forty-acre cornpatch at the edge of town in pursuit of a cat" (HTS, p. 10),

Several critics point out the sharp contrast between the language used while the novel is set in France and Tripoli and that used while it is set on the American frontier. In reference to the language in France and

Tripoli Mary McGrory says:

Mr. Davis' virtuoso style, biblical in its cadences, is a continuous joy. When he describes the three founding father's in their dotage it is in the garrulous, inventive, mirthful ramblings of a frontier tale. As the scene shifts to France the language takes on an epigrammatic paradoxical elegance. Making no attempt to reproduce the idiom of the age, Mr. Davis writes dialogue that is like a chant with its insistence on one fatal word.13

Yet it seems to me that the discrepancy in styles is more cumbersome and distracting than impressive as a virtuoso performance. James Hilton agrees and points to the writing describing life in America as one of the "real merits" of the novel: "one senses that however sound may be his understanding of French history, his feeling is for the

13. Mary McGrory, "Beulah Land," New York Times Book Review, 16 November 1947, p. 18. 112

American scene; so that Harp of a Thousand Strings is an 14 enchanting best on that note."

Davis is more comfortable in the American scene for here he can create authenticity by employing an inventive, humorous Western dialect. He enjoys using a word that trips off the tongue, such as when he describes Robinette and Jory as "old golliwhoppers" (HTS, p. 13). He uses a verb in an inventive, unusual sense, such as "If Old Crawford's taking away had accomplished that much, it might have done more to improve the moral tone of the community than Old Crawford had been able to in all his years of littering exhortations around in it" (.HTS, p. 13) (italics mine). He uses a noun as an adjective to evoke a sharp description. Finally, he includes frontier analogies for intensification: "He was tattered and whiskery, from hiding out; his moccasins were worn through and frilled halfway up his legs like anklets; he was dusty, tousled, and congested with rage and despera­ tion to the blackred cast of a cooling horseshoe" (HTS, p. 11) (italics mine).

14. James Hilton, "A French Woman Remembered," New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, 2 November 1947, p. 4. CHAPTER IV

WINDS OF MORNING

Davis1 fourth novel, entitled Winds of Morning, was first published in 1952. The action in Winds of Morning occurs in 1926 and 1927. Coupled with Davis1 final novel,

The Distant Music, which begins in 1857 and ends approxi­ mately 1920, these late works present Davis' final, and his most fully realized interpretation of life in the frontier

West. In Winds of Morning Davis employs a first-person narrator-protagonist, Amos Clarke, who recalls and relates a year of his youth that proved to be of critical personal significance. Ten years earlier, in 1926, he was a deputy sheriff in a small town on the Columbia River in Oregon.

Sent to investigate the killing of an old Indian man named

Piute Charlie, Clarke arrests the culprit, a local rancher's aide named Sylvester Busick. Busick is acquitted because he is in debt to the members of the jury and to their friends who believe they will be repaid if he is free to work.

Shortly after the trial, Clarke, whom Busick has repeatedly threatened on account of his arrest, is sent to the "back country" where he meets an old man named Pap Hendricks who is herding horses for a living. Pap Hendricks' assistant is Esteban d'Andreas, a soft-spoken young man who Clarke and

113 114

Hendricks later discover is responsible for the murder of a local rancher named Ferrand.

The plot concerns the efforts of Clarke, Hendricks, and d'Andreas to move the horses to a neighboring town where they will be sold. A subplot concerns the mystery surround­ ing the solving of the Ferrand murder. Clarke and Hendricks, each significantly involved in the plot and the subplot, are two of Davis' finest characterizations. In addition to their trying ordeal involved in moving the horse herd, their discussions of numerous varied subjects, their quarrels, separations and reunions, stimulate Clarke to overcome his misanthropy, while Hendricks also profits for he comes to terms with some disagreeable aspects of his past.

Both novels, Winds of Morning and The Distant Music, illustrate Davis' sense of place in the most general terms because they are set in the Oregon Territory about which

Davis previously has written so movingly. Yet the last two novels extend his treatment of this territory. He refuses to dwell on the homestead rush that he portrayed in Honey in the Horn, nor does he scrutinize the drama of displaced persons and the mass migration to the West Coast that figured so prominently in Beulah Land; instead, he explores the quality of everyday life, that is, homely drama, within the towns and settlements and in the surrounding spacious countryside. While summarizing the thematic contributions

Davis makes in his final two novels, Francis E. Hodgins 115 points out ways in which they are related to the preceding works:

. . . Winds of Morning and The Distant Music . . . are concerned with man's lot in the West after the journey, in its physical sense, is completed. Now that these Americans have reached the land of their desiring and have settled down to live with themselves, fulfillment must come as much in social relationships as in personal ones. Dealing with Oregon from 1850 to the 1920's—and leaving out, this time, the homesteading boom of the early twentieth century--these books center symbolically as much on the towns as upon the countryside, for now man must find dignity and significance within a pattern of settlement rather than movement.

The idea of a search for dignity and significance reoccurs in almost all of Davis' works, but previous to the last two novels such searches involved constant and widespread shifting movements via barge, wagon train, horses or on foot from one area of the West to another. There is flux in these last two novels, movement and rest, but it is within a relatively small area in the Oregon Territory. As a result, Davis achieves concentration and focus, and the search attains new import. As the frontier disappeared, as the previously unexplored and unexploited areas became familiar and settled, men, by necessity, were forced to face each other and to face the problems appearing in a nation that had reached its final borders. Deemphasizing the brutalization or hardening process that he employed frequently in earlier novels to present eccentric or

1. Hodgins, "The Literary," p. 272. 116 monomaniacal frontiersmen, Davis shifts his attention to a sober presentation of two rather ordinary men, Clarke and

Hendricks, and an ordinary woman, Calanthe, with whom Clarke

is united as the novel ends.

Throughout Winds of Morning Davis creates tension

by describing a series of contrasts between a respectable

past and a tawdry present, between the invigorating educa­

tional experiences of Clarke and Hendricks in the open country and the mediocrity and deadening routine they observe in the towns. Another contrast involves Clarke's

numerous comments that point out the disappointing results

of pioneer promise, of a people who have not accomplished

what was once hoped for, and Hendricks' faith in the

people's ability to fulfill their early promise. At first

a vehement spokesman damning the present settlers, Clarke,

as he travels with Hendricks, finds sufficient reasons to

temper his causticity. More specifically in terms of the

central conflicts of the novel, Clarke learns from his

interaction with Hendricks (man and man), he recognizes the

value of family ties (man and family), he agrees to trust

his emotions and to marry Calanthe (man and woman), and he

learns a great deal about the land, its beauty, its

beneficence, its instructional nature, and man's emotional

as well as physical bonds to it (man and nature).

Convinced that there remain valid reasons to

continue to pursue the challenges of developing the land, 117

Clarke's pioneer spirit is reborn. It is clear that Davis greatly admired strength and determination, that is, spirit, because he believed these qualities, more than any others, were responsible for the successful settlement of a harsh land. Rekindling these qualities in Clarke, who is a bitter naysayer, is Davis' way of showing how a settled land may be enriched.

The concept of spirit appears for the first time in the novel in the epigraph on the title page, taken from

St. John, III, 7,8:

Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, And thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.

In this section of the Bible, Jesus is speaking to a

Pharisee named Nicodemus and explains the process of being spiritually reborn. Jesus' attempt to convince the

Pharisee, a skeptical person, of the value of faith in and commitment to the Spirit is similar to Hendricks' efforts to convince Clarke of the value of faith in and commitment to the land, a force that often attains spiritual signifi­ cance in Davis' largely secular vision of the West. Jesus told the Pharisee that he could not see the origin of the sound of the blowing wind, yet he knows such a wind is real for he experiences it. The Pharisee must accept on faith 118

Jesus' statement that each person achieves a purpose, a direction, if he is born of the Spirit. Similarly, Clarke must realize that although there are readily apparent reasons that make it easy to succumb to despair, he must believe that a purpose, a direction, adds meaning and significance to his life; in this way Clarke is reborn from a state of hopelessness to hopefulness. Clarke believes at first that evidence is present everywhere illustrating the demise of man's spirit. Hendricks convinces Clarke that, as a member of the younger generation, he has a responsibility to renew man's efforts to carry forward the progressive spirit, in effect, to extend the process of civilizing the land.

Clarke's job as a deputy sheriff is not meaningful to him because he sees his efforts undermined by society; for example, in the Piute Charlie-Busick case when his prisoner, Busick, is freed because the jury wants Busick to repay his debts. Clarke feels this is representative of what has happened throughout the West: the people's spirit has hardened around individual greed that even subverts the issuance of democratic justice. In another sense, Davis made a shrewd choice by making Clarke an enforcer of the law since such a position raises him above the mass of citizens and conforms to his smug belief that he is better than most people. 119

Clarke selects several key incidents in order to editorialize about the quality of life in the Oregon territory in the mid 1920's. First, he refers to a fight between a rodeo performer and several prostitutes which ended in ignominious defeat for the rodeo hand when the women smacked him in the back of the head with a sewing machine and knocked him out a window. Clarke describes the fight as "the kind of scrawny little ten-cent cat fight that the whole country had come down to in those years, 2 after its earlier start at more hopeful things . . . .11

It is significant that Clarke views the fight as repre­ sentative: the participants, the surroundings, and the cause are illustrative of the tawdry times.

Once again we are reminded of what once was, "the earlier start at more hopeful things," when Clarke, gazing at a roiling river, sharply depicts the contrast between past and present:

At a distance, the churning ice and the overhang­ ing spray made it look like a place where some tremendous work was going on. In its time it had been. There had been steamboats once, driving up­ stream with soldiers for the Bannock and Piute and Blackfoot wars, and once there had been pioneers running the swift water down between the cliffs in their calked wagon beds without knowing where they were going to come out, and once long fur pirogues had passed with loads of peltries on the long haul across the continent to York Factory on Hudson's Bay. There had been Lewis and Clarke, Captain

2. H. L. Davis, Winds of Morning (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1952), p. 3. Hereafter cited as WM. 120 Bonneville, Grant, Sheridan, Crook, Gibbon, Chief Joseph, Looking Glass, Oytes the Dreamer, Smohalla ....

Nobody lived along the river now except section hands, some squatters in deserted shanties and grounded woodscows, the whores over at Tunison's establishment, and a few of his herders when the grass was up (WM, pp. 9-10).

Clarke's romantic vision of past heroic efforts that occurred at this spot makes him feel dejected because he was born too late to participate in them. He is disgusted with everyone around him because he believes that they, like him, lead unimaginative, trivial lives. But by the spring of

1927 he finds that he can uncover significance in a life that involves no great historical events. He can find meaning in the mean and ordinary.

Clarke sounds his sour note by contrasting past and present when he draws several venomous conclusions about the purposelessness of life:

Men were born, they grew up and worked at what they were thrown into, they spent half their lives struggling to acquire children and the other half trying to get rid of them, and they died for no reason except that they couldn't hang on any longer. They never had any clear belief about either their living or their dying. Chief Joseph's Indians had died at Yellow Creek and the Lolo Pass for something they believed in. Piute Charlie died because a whorehouse he had never heard of got shot up by a wandering rodeo hustler he had never seen. Ferrand died because a lonely young track snipe had his head addled by more sex than he knew what to do with. They were martyrs, in a way, but it wasn't easy to figure out exactly what they were martyrs to: the country, maybe, or civilization; or maybe nothing (WM, pp. 32-33). 121

The purposelessness Clarke describes is reminiscent of a passage of Stephen Crane's short story entitled "The Blue

Hotel." Crane's narrator draws conclusions similar to

Clarke's as to most men's vanity in thinking they under­ stand the significance of their lives:

We picture the- world as thick with conquering and elate humanity, but here, with the bugles of the tompest pealing, it was hard to imagine a peopled earth. One viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smitten, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space- lost bulb. The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life. One was a coxcomb not to die in it.^

Both Clarke and Crane's narrator sneer at man's ridiculous efforts; both view man as an ignorant thoughtless animal.

After viewing widespread ecological destruction in the Oregon territory, Clarke envisions a future in which man destroys all vegetation and animal life. At first he believes such a horror would be an unavoidable result of the march of civilization:

Civilization in any country meant shifting the balance in favor of people. That was its business. Where people had to live, other things had to die. Someday all other forms of life would be exter­ minated, and there would be nothing left anywhere but people. Then humanity could settle down with a happy sigh to revel in its triumph. There wouldn't be much of anything left to do (WM, p. 61).

Eventually, he foresees a tempered resolution to this problem by which man ultimately leaves nature unnatural, docile yet

3. Taylor, Great Short Stories, pp. 175-176. 122 not destroyed. Once again there is a contrast between the past and the present:

In Old Hendricks1 younger days, there had been more value set on people. Nature had been the enemy then, and people had to stand together against it. Now all its wickedness and menace had been taken away; the thing to be feared now was people, and nature figured mostly as a safe and reassuring refuge against their underhanded- ness and skullduggery. It was the great healer: the hydrophobia skunk that had turned into a household pet by sterilization and surgery where it would do the most good. Someday humanity would have to undergo a similar transfiguring operation and it would follow the same upward course on which nature had preceded it (WM, p. 27 2).

Clarke focuses his critical faculties on the town because he sees many ills concentrated there. Even

Hendricks contributes to this argument with a humorous tirade against the town's old men, his peers, who are content to gloat over their previous accomplishments:

". . .in this place . . . you . . . think you recognize somebody you used to know, and .... It's his son, or maybe his grandson. And the man you thought it was turns out to be some hump­ backed old whistle-breeches with his eyes bleared and his mouth wibblin* and his knees knockin' his chin when he walks . . . ." He shifted his voice to imitate a senile cackle. "Heh-heh, I don't reckon any of you could see it like it was back in eighty-two .... and there wasn't a mark of man here except a hoss blanket on a couple of sticks and a strand of barbed wire to keep off the animals. . . . We've made something out of this country. Wrested it from the wilderness .... The old pioneer sperrit, heh-heh-heh! ... a lot of these high-flyin' young folks a-rippin' around in their big cars don't have any idea of the hard­ ships we went through to build this into a land of opportunity for 'em like we done, a-ridin' in them covered wagons like it shows in the movin* pictures, and haulin' forty-cent wheat a hundred 123

and twenty miles to market, and gittin' shot at by Indians .... It was all to give our children a better chance in life than we'd had, a^d mine's made out mighty well. . . . Six of 'em a-workin* for the government regular, one a-holdin down three full-time jobs and drawin* pay for all of 'em, and his wife a-teachin school to help out; and another one with right onto eighty thousand dollars put away that'll be his free and clear when he gits out of the federal penitentiary so he can dig it up; and the girls, they're a-doin well, too. One of 'em's a-drawin' alimony from eight different husbands as steady as a clock, and another one got promoted to trusty down at the home for the feeble-minded last month. It's all been worth it. . . . Healthy home life and new country to start out in; that's what does it" (WM, pp. 226-227).

Hendricks' indictment is especially effective when the old

pioneer recalls, within a few lines, the bitter struggle to

wrest the land from Indians and the contemporary obsession

with materialism. The ignoble lives of the pioneer's descendants contrast with his own harsh, epical earlier

life.

Furthermore, throughout the novel there is a sense of disappointment that people no longer respect the efforts of a man engaging in individual struggle against the

elements. Clarke first mentions this idea when he is about

to ride out of Burnt Ridge with horses and supplies for

Hendricks. Clarke avoids the townspeople because he fears

they will ridicule him. For Clarke, a dangerous, disgust­

ing sense of misplaced values pervades the town. He says, 124

There were places even then where a man riding out of town with a couple of pack ponies towing along behind him would have been considered a sight worth calling the children to see, but in that country such things were looked down on as something a youth turned to after failing to qualify as a service- station attendant or a store-clerk, so I kept to the back streets and rode hunched over, to avoid start­ ing wild rumors (WM, p. 51).

Upon passing the town's limits Clarke feels invigorated.

Amid natural surroundings the challenge of the task facing

him cannot be cheapened by the townspeople's sneers. Davis

has written movingly about a similar situation in the short

story entitled "Open Winter." Beech Cartwright, a young man, after an arduous journey arrives in town with a herd of horses. He measures the significance of his accomplish­ ment by the looks of admiration on the faces of the nearby

boys and girls, "who watched him and stood looking after

him, knowing that he had been through more than they had

ever seen ..." (TB, p. 3 2). At an earlier point in the novel Clarke avoided the roads leading out of town because they are "piled full of automobiles bringing farm families to the moving-picture

show" (WM, p. 26). Although he dislikes loneliness, he

notes that "having too little company beat hell out of

having too much" (WM, p. 26). He is annoyed by people who,

unable to face being alone, rush into the town for a few

hours of titillation from the cinema:

The people to be pitied for loneliness were the ones who were afraid of it and struggling to get 125

away from it: the farm families from the ridge bucking in through hub-deep mud to feast their fancies on the new seven-reel feature with Gloria Swanson (WM, p. 26).

He respects those, such as Calanthe and Pap Hendricks, who bear loneliness, and who, he believes, are stronger as a result of their efforts. In this and in other ways, Clarke shows that he is an uncompromising spokesman for a code of behavior which respects individualized struggle and self- sufficiency. He finds himself opposed to the majority of people's attitudes and this seems to strengthen his resolve to maintain his beliefs. Through his characterization of

Clarke Davis creates a strong sense of self-righteousness;

Clarke possesses the kind of determined belief in himself that makes him a maverick whose opinions demand respect because they reflect strict adherence to his difficult standards. Clarke is similar to Natty Bumppo, a man who is happiest when he is secluded and immersed in his natural element, the wilderness. Clarke consistently avoids people in groups because he does not trust them. Surrounded by the open countryside, he feels safe.

Clarke's distrust of people leads him to examine another town, Crosskeys. He says that Crosskeys is differ­ ent from other settlements on the edge of the wheat fields only in that it has "no zone of truck gardens and tin-can dumps and shanties separating the wheat fields from the town" (WM, p. 181). Slowly rotting houses on the town's 126 periphery are a dismal sight:

All the houses were falling to pieces—floors rotting, beams tilted and sagging, walls gaping black where boards had fallen off, and dangling patches of grayish lichens like scraps of dry hide on a horse carcass where they still hung on. Age added no dignity to buildings in that country, and not even any pathos. The pathos was in thinking that human beings had once had to live in them (WM, pp. 181-182).

It is paradoxical that Clarke is unperturbed by the fact that his father collapsed and died in Crosskeys, yet he is disturbed by the thought that his father had been driven to the town because he was desperately lonely for companionship, and "age made him less particular what kind it was. Anything was better than nothing" (WM, p. 183).

Clarke, we sense, fears that, unless he maintains a panoply of hostility, he will be humiliated as was his father.

Clarke's antisocial behavior is a result of his reaction to the manner in which townspeople treated his father. As evidenced in "Cow-Town Widows," groups of people in isolated towns often enact a cruel ostracism in order to punish someone who made them look foolish. In "Cow-Town Widows"

Davis warned that that kind of communal behavior can result in the creation of a grotesque outcast. Clarke's father exposed what the town merchants thought to be a natural gas line as a leak in the school sewer system. Afterwards "most of them had forgotten . . . what they had to be cool to him about, but they kept it up out of habit" (WM, p. 184). As a result Clarke views suspiciously just what motivated his 127 father: "a place in town, standing, permanence, neighbors, a fence to string flowers on . . ." (WM, p. 185). Clarke is drifting toward a dangerous self-sufficiency that could become total self-imposed isolation. Davis admires the self-sufficient person on the frontier, but Clarke's case smacks of misanthropy. It is a measure of Davis' achieve­ ment that we sympathize with Clarke and we recognize how easy it is to reach a similar conclusion as we also survey, through Clarke's viewpoint, the wreckage that man wrought in the West: the destruction of nature in order to build seedy, unsubstantial towns, the callous behavior of those inhabiting the towns, a wide-snread money-grubbing mania, and wasteful governmental policies which result in the proliferation of foreclosures and unproductive land held in reserve which nobody can use.

It is not surprising that Clarke's first opinions of

Hendricks are negative. Calling him a "rickety old man"

(WM, p. 50), Clarke believes Hendricks is foolish to herd horses. But after his first encounter with Hendricks Clarke realizes that he must reexamine his opinion of Hendricks.

Then the surprised Clarke, who previously was confident that all of his dour assessments of people and places were accurate, is forced to reconsider many of these assessments.

As Clarke overhears Hendricks arguing with himself, he is impressed by Hendricks' humorous self-deprecation which illustrates his healthy ability to question himself: 128

I've got a rattle or two left in my old tail yet, by God! . . . There's other people that thinks the same .... This ain't any run-down and wrung-out country like some of 'em. I've lived all over it. I know as much about it as they do, yes, and maybe more. Let me have time to git straightened out here, and I'll— ....

Yes, you're a mighty smart man, ain't you. Layin' here in this Christly boar's nest cacklin' over what you've laid out to do, and not doin' a lick at that or anything else. You're lippin' full of big seven-hundred-dollar ideas, anybody can see that. Keen as a brier, you are; all fixed up to raise hell and put a block under it, and where have you got to? You've got horses dependin' on you, and all you can do is lay here and hoot at yourself. Name of God, if you can't give them what little help they need, how do you ever expect to do anything for yourself? (WM, pp. 60-61).

Hendricks' balanced perspective appeals to Clarke.

Clarke carefully notes that Hendricks is unlike most people: "He was more restful to be around than the people in town had been; or the people on Burnt Ridge, either, as far as that went. Some of them had principles, probably, the same as he did, but the difference was that he wasn't afraid to live up to his, even the little picayunish ones that hardly seemed worth living up to all the time" (WM, p. 65).

His independent spirit and confidence in the land is illustrated by his belief in the value of his horses at a time when horses were being replaced by farm machinery.

Hendricks and Clarke discover that tractors are not suitable for farming sandy soil and steep slopes. One tractor, discarded and rusted, has three wheels sunk into the soft earth and a fourth wheel "slanted up in the air 129 like a man gesticulating for help after a well had caved in on him" (WM, p. 79). This tractor is a symbol of the widespread mismanagement plaguing territorial development.

Just as Hendricks aids the local farmers with his horses, so he aids Clarke with his counsel. Davis skill­ fully connects both healing processes. Clarke recognizes that Hendricks' determination to hold on to his horses until a market for them appears is based on faith, topographical knowledge, and what Hendricks calls "solid sentiment" (WM, p. 95). Hendricks tells Clarke "This is a place where people live up to their sentiments if it kills

'em, so it'll fit right in" (WM, p. 96). When Clarke replies that that is no longer true because times change,

Hendricks contradicts Clarke's complacent belief that the land is populated by the incompetent heirs of the pioneers:

"Times do change. People don't, though" (WM, p. 96).

Hendricks believes that the pioneer spirit endures; his horses support his belief that meaningful challenges remain.

There still exist rugged tests against which a man can measure his strength. This idea, the theme of "The Kettle of Fire," is most succinctly stated when Hendricks tells Clarke: "You can talk all you want about how this country's got all the stretch worked out of it. There's places in it that ain't been worked at all. The trouble with young sprigs like you is that you don't get out and look for 'em"

(WM, p. 98). Probably the most significant theme in Davis' 130

works, illustrating his universal as well as regional

appeal, is his belief in the viable challenges his charac­

ters uncover in the modern West. It is a reflection of

Davis' place within the Western tradition. As Wallace

Stegner said, "any Westerner, except those who come from a

few large cities—is the product of a world still nascent,

and therefore hopeful." 4

A hopeful world is one which includes the possi­

bility of love, and this is another area in which Clarke

benefits from Hendricks' advice and example. It is not i apparent until near the end of the jnovel that Hendricks returns to the Columbia River settlements to visit his

wife's grave. He confesses that their relationship suffered

after he left her in order to live with an Indian woman.

He did this to procure her grazing land for his cattle

which were about to starve. Hendricks explains the dilemma

he faced:

If I hadn't done it, we'd have gone broke. That would have hurt her, too. The cattle was all we had, and she'd put as much into 'en as I had. I thought she'd sooner keep 'em than be cleaned out and have to start all over again. I didn't think. . . . I thought she felt the same way about it that I did, I guess. Nobody wants to be broke and have to depend on other people. I done the only thing I could that would head it off (WM, p. 320).

"The Kettle of Fire" presented us with a moral decision

equally complex and equally troublesome. In "The Kettle

4. Stegner, "Born a Square," p. 46. 131 of Fire" the narrator, sent into the desert to find fire for

the wagon train, mistakenly shoots and kills his former

employer. He can either run away from all responsibility, face his employer's friends, or return with the fire to

those•depending on him. Although Hendricks' wife was dis­

pleased by his decision, they remained together. The incident, as recalled by Hendricks, communicates to Clarke

a moving sense of commitment.

Hendricks also manages to soften what A. B. Guthrie

Jr. calls Clarke's "hard-boiled innocence" through Hendricks' relationship with Mrs. Ferrand, his daughter.5 After it is

apparent that she is an accomplice to her husband's murder,

Hendricks reminds her of the promise she held, of the love

they once shared. Hendricks feels this will appeal to her

ethical code. He succeeds in inducing her to confess to him

and to promise him that she will end her relationship with

Busick, a blackmailer. Her behavior leads Clarke to think

that "It was the consciousness of being loved that had

finally started her crying: not guilt or remorse or fear,

but being made to see how far she had fallen short of what

she had been loved for to begin with: the failure, the

waste, the desecration" (WM, p. 307). Howard Mumford Jones

admires Hendricks' use of "the force of love," a force which

5. A. B. Guthrie, Jr., "Robust, Earthy, Full of Kick," New York Times Book Review, 6 January 1952, p. 5. 132 eventually leads Clarke to recognize his own need to make a commitment to Calanthe.**

As Clarke decides to see Calanthe again he recalls

Hendricks' advice: he "had been right—a man didn't escape from anything by skirting around it. The way to end it was to go straight through it and have it over with, for good or bad" (WM, p. 340). Tlie springtime morning winds symbolize the renewal of Clarke's personality; petals, dead stems and leaves swept away to make way for new growth correlate with the deadened emotions and dour opinions that had to be destroyed before Clarke could commit himself to Calanthe:

Then the door opened and she climbed down into the cloud of petals and dead stems and wreckage and stood shading her eyes against it, and then she came running through it, laughing and letting it beat on her face. When she got close, I saw that the wind was spattering tears across her cheek­ bones. I had intended to go back to the horses before telling her anything, but I ran to her and caught her and bent her head back, and let all that old Hendricks had taught me blow away with the loose petals and dried locust blossoms and shed catkins that were ending to make room for a beginning (WM, p. 344).

While he creates internal and external conflicts by depicting Clarke's gradually diminishing hostility toward people and places, Davis employs landscape to make the dramatic action more credible. Clarke appreciates the beauty of the land, its potential beneficence, its soothing qualities and its instructional nature. His awareness of

6. Howard Mumford Jones, "Epic Innocence of the West," Saturday Review, 13 January 1952, p. 16. 133 i, these aspects leads to an emotional attachment to the land that provides significant character and landscape inter­ action.

Winds of Morning is rich with passages that vividly render the Oregon countryside. In a review of the novel

Margaret Marshall calls "The most rewarding thing about

Winds of Morning . . . its evocation of Western country, morning, noon, and night . . . Mr. Davis has written a fine documentary of the land and the season." 7 A reviewer for

Time magazine called Davis' descriptions "really intensely restrained affection" and noted that "The natural world

. . . is the only real character in Winds of Morning; the people in the book appear chiefly as traits of the charac­ ter. Ordinarily, this would be a fatal flaw. The measure of novelist Davis' success is that he will almost certainly make a great many readers decide that his favorite country

g deserves the affectionate priority he gives it." Through­ out the novel Davis adopts a chatty, informal style to describe events and natural processes in a thoroughly con­ vincing manner; for example:

We went out, leaving the young Mexican asleep back of the stove. There had been times during the night when it sounded as if the whole place was

7. Margaret Marshall, "Notes by the Way," The Nation, 2 February 1952, p. 110.

8. "Big Land," rev. of Beulah Land, Time, 57 (7 January 1952), 90. 134

being ripped to gun wadding, but the only damage visible was a few half-dead trees broken down in the thicket around the ruins of the burned house, and some dead branches torn off and flung against the broken-down fence. The river had changed color a little; it was not blackish, as it had been when we looked at it from the hillside, and not roily, as lowland rivers always were after a hard rain, but milky green, like snow water that has thawed too fast for the air to separate from it. The current was swift, but it held to its ordinary level as if the torrents of rain flooding into it had been beneath its notice. One thing about those rimrock rivers was that wet and dry seasons never raised or lowered them. When there were floods, the surplus seeped out into the crevices of the rimrock, sometimes hoisting the water table fifty or sixty miles away, and when there was a drought it seeped back again. The rivers always ran the same (WM, p. 96).

Passages such as this one not only heighten the novel's realism but help to characterize Clarke, for they illustrate his affection for nature, a presence that he can look to as an unchanging, unthreatening force in his life.

Another way in which landscape and character interact hearkens back to a passage in "A Walk in the Woods" in which Davis points out the merits of close natural observation. In Winds of Morning Clarke compares the process of scrutinizing a waterhole with that of scrutiniz­ ing a community. A person attuned to nature knows that if he looks closely into a waterhole he will spot myriad forms of life below the surface. This is applicable to the human world as well. For example, Busick's acquittal, on the surface, looks just and uncomplicated, but close inspection reveals a complex set of motivations pointing 135

to the jury's real reasons for their verdict: in this way

nature teaches man to be more perceptive:

Exploring into the real ins and outs of a community like that is something like taking a deep look into a waterhole out in the desert. You can ride within a few feet of a desert waterhole everyday for a year without ever actually seeing the water at all, only the things it reflects: sky, willows, snake­ weed, tules, rye grass, maybe a few circling snake — doctors and a bird or two. But when you get down to drink from it and lean close, the reflections disappear and the life under the surface becomes visible: water b'-is, tadpoles, minnows, dwarf crawfish, pin-poxnt molluscs, naked roots, red water weeds, thread grasses. The mere shadowing out of some surface images that never really existed opens up a whole new world as active and populous as your own, different from anything in it and still part of it ... . There were rela­ tionships and intermarriages and outstanding obligations and tieups with co-operatives and fraternal orders all the way down the whole jury list. What it came to was that a lot of the merchants had thought collecting some back bills was more important than being vindictive about a case of accidental manslaughter, and the jury had let them have their way about it, not to be unaccommodating (WM, pp. 44-45).

Hig, a character in A. B. Guthrie's novel entitled

The Way West, says that the West "puts its mark on a man,

and the mark is that he ain't sure who he is, being little

by the size of it." 9 Subsequently, Guthrie points out that

many pioneer Westerners carved initials in rocks or trees

to help them to create a sense of personal identity in the

wilderness."^ Clarke, on the other hand, glories in his

9. A. B. Guthrie, Jr., The Way West (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), p. 173.

10. Guthrie, The Way West, p. 173. 136 anonymity and enjoys knowing that nature will continue to put its mark on men, to wipe out all traces of man's efforts, his successes as well as his failures:

It was a kind of deliverance to spread down beside the old orchard without knowing who had set it out or what his character had been or what sentiments he had squandered his life's enthusiasm on. The moss-cankered old fruit trees were weighed down with dead wood and broken branches, and choked underneath by wild sprouts and vines and deer brush so dense it looked as if a starved-down snake would have had trouble moving around in it. Yet the mud around the pool where the spring ran out showed tracks of bobcats, porcupines, coyotes, lynx cats, skunks, rabbits, grouse, quail, badger, chip­ munks, and two or three deer, all leading back into the thickest part of the tangle. It was consoling to think that nature could take hold of an orchard that had been planted as an outpost against the wilderness, and, with scarcely an effort, turn it into a wilderness itself after all the wilderness around it had disappeared. It was evening up with humanity for some of its triggering with the designs of nature, and there was no reminiscence of humanity mixed into it (WM, p. 154).

Davis realizes that man shares some mystical aware­ ness of the land which documentarian prose cannot capture.

In these cases he poetically evokes the images, as in the following passages, that show nature provoking Clarke to connect flashes of sweeping snow with flashes of love sweep­ ing through Hendricks;

We rode on for the open country beyond the wheat fields. The wind dropped and a white frost began falling as we drew clear of them, the sharp frost crystals flashing blue and orange and blinding white in the starlight as they came floating down through the darkness like incandescent flakes of diamond; like threads raveled from a star; like streaks of pain lightening a last agony of loneli­ ness; like a man's gloom of knowledge lit and 137

tormented into restlessness by shreds of love. It ' was no wonder that old Hendricks had not fallen into the cackling senility of the old men he had been mimicking. His conscience had kept him prodded out of it (WM, pp. 228-229).

Clarke compares the power of love for his family driving through Hendricks to a snowstorm driving across the land­ scape. At another point, shortly after Clarke and

Hendricks quarrel and part, Clarke surveys the surrounding landscape and basks in his ability to partake of a scene without any past associations or memories that could lessen his purer appreciation of nature: "Looking at the crags as

I had been used to looking at them, clean and uncluttered by old associations, was so much of a triumph that they didn't seem a familiar sight at all, but something entirely new, because I was seeing them for the first time with a full appreciation of their meaninglessness" (WM, p. 153).

In conclusion, the skillful blending of character and setting make Winds of Morning an excellent novel, perhaps Davis' best. It contains a thoughtful, mature assessment of the problems involved in coming to grips with a rapidly changing West. In Honey in the Horn two of the pioneer's children, Clay and Luce, are frantically searching for a new beginning as they return to and recross the land that is already settled. Ruhama and Askwani in Beulah Land realize that such a search is only valuable if they can pursue it together. Clarke, looking back at events that occurred ten years earlier, achieves a tempered attitude 138 toward living in a nonheroic but certainly not ignoble era.

Clarke represents Davis' view that with the spectacular boom times over, people must look to each other in order to find dignity within their ordinary lives. The drama of ordinary people's interaction against a vivid Western landscape creates extraordinary fiction. CHAPTER V

THE DISTANT MUSIC

The Distant Music, Davis' final novel, was published in 1957, three years before he died. The plot of The

Distant Music spans nearly sixty years, relating events in the lives of three generations of the MuLock family from

1857 until approximately 1915. The setting is the Oregon

Territory, an area that Davis has explored in four of his five novels. More specifically, the novel occurs in and around a town called Clark's Landing on the Columbia River.

The. first Ranse Mulock to appear there is cantankerous and secretive. In the 1850's pre-emption land laws specified that an unmarried man was entitled to one square mile of free land and a married man was entitled to twice that amount. Ranse, in order to gain the maximum amount of land, buys a captive fourteen year old white girl, named Medora, from a Blackfoot Indian tribe and then marries her. Shortly after she returns with him to his land she miscarries the child of one of the Blackfoot Indians who raped her.

Throughout their marriage Ranse works diligently to build a respectable cattle and sheep trade business, and, thus, to establish himself in the community whose individual members

139 140

he scorns. Eventually, he and Medora have two sons, Claib

and Ranse.

When Ranse spots the Blackfoot Indian who raped

Medora, he kills him. Ranse becomes exhausted during his

escape, suffers a heart attack and dies. Medora, partly

because of her guilt over the Indian's death and partly

because of her ambivalent feelings toward Indians, befriends

many of them. But their presence on the Mulock property is

a constant irritant to Claib and Ranse Jr. who think that

Medora is a fool to continually aid the Indians. Claib

leaves home in disgust when Medora agrees to pay an Indian's debts by selling a section of the land. He is killed in a fall from a horse as he attempts to kidnap his son from his wife. His death is confirmed and his body returned to

Clark's Landing while the town is saluting Medora for selling more of her valuable land, this time for the rail­ road. In the aftermath of the ordeal provoked by her son's death, Ranse Jr. promises Medora that he will stay on the Mulock land, and he begins developing it after accepting, as his business associate, the father of a squatter family named Inman. Consequently, much of the

land becomes commercialized by the construction of homes

and factories and the railroad. Eventually, Ranse marries

Stella who gives birth to the third Ranse Mulock but who

then runs off with one of the Inman men. The third Ranse

Mulock leaves the Mulock land in order to pursue a career 141 with the railroad and to avoid responsibility for the family property. He returns when his father's death seems imminent.

The novel ends as the Mulocks are reunited, Lydia Inman saves Old Ranse's life, and Young Ranse and Nina Inman agree to marry and to remain at Clark's Landing.

The Distant Music is an ambitious novel for several reasons: it spans six decades; it traces the lives of three generations of settlers; and it details the slow, steady growth of a small community. In all of his fiction Davis shows his deep interest in the Western frontier from the mid-nineteenth century through the closing of the frontier around 1890 until the World War I era, but in each previous novel he scrutinized a specific period within that time span. In The Distant Music his chronicle of one family allows him the freedom to cover the entire time period that he found so fascinating. Yet while he refuses to restrict himself temporally, spatially he breaks with his panoramic efforts in the earlier novels to focus on one specific area of land. Place is, once again in his works, a living presence and the interaction of character and setting provides thematic significance, for each generation of

Mulock must experience and come to accept in its own way its growing interdependent relationship with the land.

Davis takes his novel's epigraph and title from

Book I, Section 36, of The Travels of Marco Polo. Polo writes that crossing the Desert of Lop, which is located 142 east of Turkey and north of the Himalaya Mountains, is extremely dangerous: "In this tract neither beasts nor birds are met with, because there is no kind of food for them."''" In his epigraph Davis chose to emphasize Polo's report of the elements of danger that people mistakenly assumed were supernatural:

Sometimes . . . during the day these spirits assume the appearance of travelling companions, who address them by name and endeavour to conduct them out of the proper road. . . . Marvellous indeed and almost passing belief are the stories related to these spirits of the desert, which are said at times to fill the air with the sounds of all kinds of musical instru­ ments, and also of drums and the clash of arms.2

Polo adds that "Such are the excessive troubles and dangers that must unavoidably be encountered in the passage of this desert."3

Two important points of comparison involve Polo's and Davis' interest in spirit and journeys. First, each calls our attention to supernatural beings or spirits that can frighten and mislead travellers. In addition, spirit as vital principle and animating force is involved in each work because determined spirit is necessary for success.

But they differ concerning the nature of the journey. The

1. Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, The Venetian, trans, am1 ed. William Marsden (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1948), p. 67.

2. Polo, Travels, p. 68.

3. Polo, Travels, p. 68. 143 journey or quest, movement and purposeful direction, is a motif in much of Davis* work. Polo's journey, fraught with real and imagined dangers, was from a familiar world to an exotic Orient. Davis' novel includes a journey but only in the sense of a trip through time. In sharp contrast to

Polo's epic journey, Davis presents a homely cast of characters who, literally, go nowhere. All of the action occurs in and around one small town—the endpoint of so many epical journeys across the vast Western frontier.

But this is not to say that The Distant Music lacks motion and movement irom place to place. Indeed, as Walter

Van Tilburg Clark pointed out in a thoughtful review of the novel: "There is plenty of motion in the story still.

. . . But none of this motion gets anywhere. It all radiates out from the motionless center, and comes back to

it again. And it decreases steadily, while the inward motion and the word-of-mouth motion increase. The only steady movement is a counter movement, the slow creeping outward of the town . . . ." 4 Depicting the motion involved

in the metamorphosis of a frontier village into an indus­

trialized town helps Davis to achieve a chronological

panorama. It is important to recognize that the novel reflects an historical reality for, strictly speaking, the

frontier was no longer a geographical line separating

4. Walter Van Tilburg Clark, "The Call of the Far Country," New York Times Book Review, 3 February 1957, p. 5. 144

civilization and savagery, nor was it any longer an area

once passed by in the rush westward, but, instead, the

frontier came increasingly to mean the process of gradual

modernization and accommodation. With growth came the

attendant problems of people who no longer have a safety-

valve area to which to escape but who find they must come

_ ^)*"t:6Tirrs""wrth—tixe~±anxl"a:nd--wi"teh-:each other.

Because the Ranse Mulock chronicle is Davis' attempt

to depict man's relationship with his land and with his

fellow man, it is certainly his most enterprising novel.

He is, in fact, anticipating and answering the call for an

American land ethic that N. Scott Momaday issued in an

essay entitled "An American Land Ethic":

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular land­ scape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk ....

I am interested in the way that a man looks at a given landscape and takes possession of it in his blood and brain. For this happens, I am certain, in the ordinary motion of life. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation i s unimaginable. We have sooner or later to come to terms with the world around us— and I mean especially the physical world, not only as it is revealed to us immediately through our senses, but also as it is perceived more truly in the long turn of seasons and of years. And we 145

must come to moral terms. There is no alternative. I believe, if we are to realize and maintain our humanity, for our humanity must consist in part in the ethical as well as the practical ideal of preservation. And particularly here and now is that true. We Americans need now more than ever before—and indeed more than we know—to imagine who and what we are with respect to the earth and sky. I am talking about an act of the imagination essentially, and the concept of an American land ethic.

It is no doubt more difficult to imagine in 1970 the landscape of America than it was in, say, 1900. Our whole experience as a nation in this century has been a repudiation of the pastoral ideal which informs so much of the art and litera­ ture of the nineteenth century. One effect of the Technological Revolution has been to uproot us from the soil. We have become disoriented, I believe; we have suffered a kind of psychic dis­ location of ourselves in time and space. We may be perfectly sure of where we are in relation to the supermarket and the next coffee break, but I doubt that any of us knows where he is in rela­ tion to the stars and to the solstices. Our sense of the natural order has become dull and unreliable. Like the wilderness itself, our sphere of instinct has diminished in proportion as we have failed to imagine truly what it is. And yet I believe that it is possible to formulate an ethical idea of the land—a notion of what it is and must be in our daily lives—and I believe moreover that it is absolutely necessary to do so.->

As he scrutinizes the lives of three generations of Ranse

Mulocks, Davis comes to terms, sensually, emotionally, psychically and morally, with his world. He prompts us to come to terms with our land too. The bulk of Davis* fiction dramatizes his interpretation of the process of settling the frontier: the reasons people moved, the hardships, the

5. N. Scott Momaday, "An American Land Ethic," Sierra Club Bulletin, February 1970, pp. 10-11. 146 ruin and waste as well as the satisfactions involved. But beyond the frenetic movement so vividly portrayed in Honey in the Horn and Beulah Land lies the kinship finally achieved between man and land described in The Distant

Music.

Once again adopting the ironist's point of view,

Davis suggests that perhaps the kinship between man and land partly developed from a desire on the part of a man, the first Ranse Mulock, to flee from his former Midwestern neighbors whom he loathes. By Ranse's failure to survey a single magnificent panoramic view or to recite America's grand manifest destiny, Davis debunks a sterotypical inter­ pretation of the Western experience. Instead, Ranse settles in Clark's Landing after being beaten by his

Missouri neighbors. It seems that his only goal in working the land and making it productive is to illustrate his scorn for others. Although his motives are somewhat less than heroic, by the act of taking possession and utilizing the land he initiates the Mulock-land bond that influences every subsequent generation of his family.

There is a powerful sense of the land's brooding presence throughout the novel, a land so vast and threaten­ ing that people plant "shade-trees round their houses to 147 keep from being reminded of it."^ Perhaps Ranse's grand scheme to build a sprawling ranch house is in response to the land's imposing nature. In any case, the land's presence contributes to the success of his marriage since it creates a unifying bond between him and his wife. She thinks, "There was something steadying in knowing that he was still set in his determination to hold onto the land, not that she cared especially about keeping it, but it did show a fixity of purpose instead of the shift and flutteri- ness she had been afraid of" (DM, p. 63). Ranse never sells any of his land, but the "restlessness of the country" (DM, p. 63) prevents him from ever finishing his house because he continually makes business trips that interrupt construc­ tion. Ranse's restlessness or franticness foreshadows the novel's most significant dramatic conflict that derives from oppositional urges to flee the land or to remain and face its accompanying responsibilities. The first Ranse Mulock's understanding of this dilemma is incomplete. He fails to realize that his frenetic behavior is a result of his fear of being tied down: "He kept at it [business trips] during those years like a horse running downhill through the underbrush with a swarm of yellow-hackets in pursuit, not daring to look back or figure out a course ahead or do anything except keep going" (DM, p. 64).

6. H. L. Davis, The Distant Music (New York: Popular Library, 1957), p^ 9~. Hereafter cited as DM. 148

One of the earliest conflicts in which the land plays a significant role involves Medora and her son,

Claib. Medora, after inheriting the Mulock property, forces Claib to leave home when she sells land to aid an insolvent Indian. Claib states that he will not stay since she chooses to dishonor his father's wishes: "This was pa's land. He didn't want any of it sold off to anybody"

(DM, p. 92). After Claib's departure Medora relinquishes possession of even more land, in this case to the railroad in the name of progress. The railroad entrepreneurs care nothing for the ecology, and Davis' sardonic tone empha­ sizes his disgust at their insincerity. Medora is portrayed as a dunce because she does not perceive the selfish motivations behind the railroad men's pitch:

To the newer men, most of them from overcrowded hard-scrabble sections of the East, the sweep of country back of the skyline around the Landing was as remote and meaningless as a page in a school geography, and a deep and abiding concern for what happened inside the corporate limits the only completely acceptable sign of a man's substance and dignity and farsightedness. It was clearly their responsibility to persuade Medora out of enough land to fill the railroad company's requirements. They had no money to buy it from her, and more bank stock had already been issued than there was any hope of capital to cover, so they went to work on her with appeals to her public-spiritedness, arguments about the town's prospects and possibilities, lectures on her duty to society and the public welfare, and the fore­ casts of the increase in value of her remaining land that could be anticipated from having railroad shops and yards located on a corner of it that had never before been considered worth keeping up the taxes on (DM, pp. 98-99). 149

The town's new lawyer, Liscomb Van Meter, believes that progress can only be translated into more and more growth. His speech praising the railroad terminates when Medora faints as she spots her dead son's saddle. In one of the most artful passages in the novel Davis captures a sense of place by describing the ambiance of the town, the celebration, and the crowd. By probing Medora's memories of her frugal, difficult life with her husband, Davis undercuts the glib orator's paean to pioneer life:

He had been detailed to let Medora in on what her transfer of the land to the railroad really amounted to, and, feeling that his message would go down easier with some trimming up, he opened with the history of the early pioneers and their hardships and sacrifices and sufferings and hopes and heroism working his way up from that to the point that, hard though it had all been, it had achieved its crown and consummation in events such as they were witnessing, in the prosperity and expansion of towns such as the Landing and the welfare and happiness and security of its growing population. . . . It may have been that the opening refer­ ences to pioneer hardships and sacrifices stirred some memory in her of what her hardships and sacrifices had really amounted to and what they had done to her; or it may have been a subconscious reaction to the people watching and applauding, the dusty ac i e and a half of scraggly men and over­ weight women and raucously scuffling children, the farm families eating and squabbling in their wagons along the station fence, the scattering of hustlers and sharpshooters and floaters and drunks and dimwits drifting around the edge of the crowd without listening to any of the speechmaking or knowing what was being celebrated, the whole litter of humanity whose progress and expansion was supposed to be her enduring recompense for everything her life had been forced to and everything it had been denied; or it may have been seeing the linemen from 150

the work-train carrying Claib's rain-warped old saddle and rust-patched split-oar bridle past her to the station platform, or it may have been only the heat and excitement and the strangeness and being fevered and unwell to begin with. What­ ever it was, in the very midst of being held up to public acclaim the paroxysm of grief that had come on her outside her consciousness once before took hold on her again (DM, pp. 100-101).

This moving passage convinces us that Claib's judgment of his Mother was too harsh. She was well aware of what the land cost in human terms. This idea is emphasized when Medora is ill and bed-ridden, and she recalls the land's burdens. When she was a child her family became lost in the Oregon wilderness, "and finally, after a run of sickness, accidents, panic quarreling, cattle stampedes, and guides that turned out to be worth­ less, went to pieces among the rockslides and jack-pine thickets of high mountain range that nobody knew the name of because it was not supposed to be there at all" (DM, p. 18). The emotionally charged nature of her relationship with the land is a result of several incidents etched in her memory: the land claimed the lives of her family; she was forced to live with Indians for two years, part of that time as a slave; and her life with Ranse was, for a long time, spartan. As she recalls these events she realizes she can honor her dead by making the land that they died for serve her. Medora's emotional assessment of the land's toll contributes to Davis' American land ethic, for she 151 represents a way of measuring the value of the land in individual human terms. A dialogue between Medora and Ranse helps to clarify this point. Referring to the beach land, she tells him, Your father wanted it. . . .He had his head set on it. We worked on it together; years without seeing anybody except to buy things from in town. . . . It was what he wanted that counted. I'd told him that to start with, and I never let him down on it. . . . So it's cost us enough, and other people too; all the people in my father's wagon-train that died, and one or two others that got killed. Now it'll have to be yours.

Ranse: . . . There's something I ought to tell you. I'd thought I might leave the land and go somewhere else. I didn't know about this then. I didn't know about what was back of the land. . . .

There's been places I had to leave after I was used to 'em, she said. People I'd sooner have stayed with than come here, things I'd sooner have done. The town we left to go with the emigrations had houses and shade-trees and side-walks and a river with keelboats on it. We'd as well not have left. All we've got to show for all of it is this land, and Claib's gone now. I didn't know how to raise him, or he'd still be here and you wouldn't have to stay if you didn't want to. . . .

It was as if the land had been in her mind as the meeting-place of trails marked out by all her dead. . . .

What people think don't matter, she said, . . . You won't leave like Claib did. You can't now, you'll promise. There's nobody else to look after the land, and it's cost too much to let go. I've done the best I could. I know it wasn't enough. I know— (DM, pp. 126-127).

Ranse discovers that his promise to Medora and his own emotional ties to the land influence his behavior with others in a disproportionate manner. For example, shortly 152 after Ranse and Stella marry they quarrel over the Inmans.

Stella wants them to vacate the Mulock property;. Ranse refuses to order them to do so. He realizes that his stubborn refusal to agree to Stella's request is caused by his selfish desire to possess complete control over the land:

His stubbornness . . . was because of the land. Giving in on even a small point like the Inmans would have meant giving her a hold on all of it, on everything that had to do with it, on all the lives that had gone into making it his. He couldn't have done that. He had no right to ..." (DM, p. 140).

Later the land alters the course of his personal life when he decides not to marry Cynthia because as his wife she would be an equal owner of all of the Mulock property.

Perhaps Ranse's most significant revelation of the land's influence occurs when he is an old man recalling the years which he spent building homes and otherwise developing the land. He interprets his efforts as a subterfuge that became a means of self-evasion:

He had called his holding back sacrifice, self- discipline, atonement; the truth was that it had been lack of nerve, a tame-spirited dragging along after what had come easiest. Medora had laid it on about all the people who had given their lives to make the land his, but even that had something shallow and adventitious about it. The land was not what they had given their lives for. It was merely what had got tangled in the net they had thrown out for other things, probably better and certainly different, that had escaped it. They wouldn't have considered a mere spread of sand­ hill and rockbreak worth giving their lives for. But he was old, young Ranse and the men had said 153

so, and he had given his for it without even trying for anything else. Now there was nothing else left to try for (DM, pp. 170-171).

This feeling of disillusion and defeat is amplified when Lydia, Cynthia, Tencey, and Old Ranse reassemble at the

Mulock house. Davis' tone is sympathetic toward these weary people who are dejected because of their meager lives.

Old Ranse seems to have convinced himself that his death is imminent. When some neighbors spot him wandering in the countryside, they remember that "an old man who felt him­ self about to die always tried to use his last strength to walk out and look over his land, maybe because it was the only visible thing by which he could measure what his life had amounted to" (DM, p. 192). Lydia seems destined to suffer a similar fate for while searching for Old Ranse she surveys the beach land, sees the place where she spent her youth threatened by ugly urban blight, and feels deeply troubled because her life is a failure:

The sun was almost on a level with the houses back of her, and its light glancing from the upstairs window of one enveloped it in a glare of cold blinding flame that made all the adjoin­ ing houses look as if they were growing bigger and crowding each other. Something about the strangeness made her remember what the beach had been like . ien they first turned their wagon in through the old nailed-up gate to camp on it, and made her think that the years it had spent- growing into paved streets and houses and people growing and crowding each other for room she had spent in grief and loss, waste and growth into futility and emptiness (DM, pp. 195-196). 154 At the moment when both Old Ranse, blind and grief-stricken, and Lydia, lonely and racked by self-pity, are stripped of all hope and spirit, Davis unites them and, through a complic.ited series of revelations about the land and each other, presents them with a rationale for continuing to live. When Lydia is called upon to help Old Ranse, who is hallucinating and struggling fiercely to escape from his house, she soothes him by relating a melange of memories, stories, tall-tales, and evocative descriptions. This beautifully crafted section of the novel employs repetition, parallel structure,and lush images in a tour de force: She had brought up the things worth seeing mostly as an arguing point, without having thought about what they were or whether they really were worth seeing or not. They were things she had lived through, for the most part too anxiously or too desperately for any detached impression of them to survive or even be formed. Trying to call them back as they might have struck anybody else drew her back into them, not one after another, as they had registered on her memory, but all together as a single experience, without the effort of remembering any of them. She began to tell about the wet foothill country along the Coast, the stands of black spruce fronting meadows of salt- grass and wild asters, the alder thickets along the rivers, the big fir trees that were sometimes hollow and full of clear white pitch that was valuable for something or other, and how her father cut into one once by accident and held the pitch from running out with his hands while the boys walked five miles to the house for tubs and buckets to catch it in; about dead-bee-trees full of white alder honey, and open swathes cut by some windstorm through the deep timber so that one could travel for a day on dead logs five or six feet above the ground, with tall fireweed and foxgloves reaching up to bloom underfoot and thousands of bright-colored little gartcrsnakes 155

sunning themselves on the logs that had to be switched out of the way so one could walk at all; of salmon washed up on the river-banks during the spawning runs and the men having to hunt them out and burn them so the dogs wouldn't get poisoned by eating them; and about beaver-dams where trout could be lassoed with a horse-hair noose on a switch in the deep holes close to the bank.

She told about the high mountain country where the timber belt began with oak and then changed to yellow pine, then to fir, then to white pine and cedar, then to aspen and pitchy jack-pine, and finally to little bunches of dwarf willow growing in rock crevices at the edge of the snow-fields, and of trying to sleep beside one of the snow-creeks when the snow was melting and big boulders jarred and tumbled in the current all night and shook the ground like blasting stumps, and of snow-water so cold that putting one's fingers in it was like having an arm run over by a train, and of dead tree- stumps eight feet through standing in high snow- meadows where the cold held on so late that even the dwarf willow only grew a few inches high. She told about places in the sagebrush where there were ice-caves under the ground, and rivers where the cattle in the Spring pastured neck-deep in the water and dived for the long tufts of grass at the bottom, and of flocks of gray wild geese that pastured and bedded with the sheep to keep from being shot at, and clouds of little white land gulls following the men plowing, and the mirage country where men on horseback at a distance looked as if they were mounted on horses twenty feet tall and a line of freight-wagons crossing a ridge would have their wagon-canvases magnified so they looked like ships under full sail, and of a great luminous half-circle that had appeared once across an alkali flat an hour or so after sundown in which there was a gigantic figure standing that none of them had seen alike: they had all seen it, but each had seen it as himself (DM, pp. 246-247).

Lydia rejuvenates Old Ranse and rekindles his desire to live by reminding him what he and others endured while 156 settling the Territory. She reestablishes his relationship with the land. And at the same time, she realizes the significance of her life. As a new day dawns, sunlight strikes tree leaf and telephone wire, symbolic of nature's and man's harmonious relationship, and Lydia, exhausted yet satisfied, recalls a story about an old man who intended on a dare to butt heads with a dangerous billy-goat. He would have killed himself until some of his neighbors forced him to stop. Lydia recognizes the relevance of that story to her life: They told him that maybe stayin alive didn't mean anything to him, but it did to them, and they wouldn't stand for any damn fool gamblin around with it to show off. ... If the people were right, it meant that her reasoning was mistaken, and that she had done not badly but well. If they were right, the places she had lived and left behind and all the lives she had touched and lost had not been wasted, and nothing of all she had gathered was either dead or useless. If they were right, the deep swell of tears and rest and sweetness from which reason had tried to hold her back was peace (DM, p. 254).

The Distant Music offers a thematic extension of the four preceding novels; Davis suggests that in order to lessen the intensity of the failings of their lives his characters should reflect on the satisfaction gleaned from accomplishing difficult tasks, recognize the significance of community, and develop a sense of perspective by being fully aware of their contributions to the civilizing of a land. Young Ranse represents hope for the future because he intends to end his self-imposed exile, marry Nina, and 157 return to his family's property. Young Ranse had fallen prey to a distant music that caused him to glimpse an intriguing vision which he later realized was futile to pursue. All of Davis' characters discover that they must maneuver and accommodate in order to avoid becoming victimized by distant strains of music that lead only to personal distress. CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

The most compelling aspect of H. L. Davis1 fiction is his ability to evoke a sense of place, that is, to cap­ ture the ambiance of middle and late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Western America by focusing on the meaningful interaction of man and the surrounding landscape. Place is central to all of his works, for it significantly affects his style, characterizations, and themes, and a study of his works must detail the interrelationships of these elements. Each of the novels is set on the fluid, gradually disappearing frontier. Davis returned again and again to that specific area in the West with which he was familiar since childhood, the Oregon territory, the end- point of so many arduous journeys and the setting for the pioneers' prickly realizations of the difficulty of achieving substantial wealth. In general, his thematic fictional purposes were to illustrate the coming of age of the American frontier, the quintessential qualities of the pioneers, and the aspects of our Western experience that contributed to the American character.

In order to accomplish his thematic goals Davis realized that he had to be respected as an accurate

158 historical novelist. One way in which he earns his reader' respect is by writing about that which he knew from first­ hand experience and that which functions as a forceful, unchanging presence in his works: nature. Consistently recognized as "an adroit sketcher of the natural scene""'' whose "density and authenticity of . . . background" 2 is superb, Davis skillfully uses nature to render an accurate, vivid representation of various locales throughout the West

The most readily apparent aspect of his work is the large amount of knowledge about nature that he possessed and the striking manner in which he communicated his knowledge through inventive, realistic, succinct, and lively language

Yet rarely do we sense that nature's presence and process overwhelm characterization in his novels; Davis is not victimized by the common mistake in Western fiction that allows setting to substitute for society. Davis knew that by employing authentic background he gained credibility and acceptance for his plots, characters, and themes, because, as Robert Penn Warren points out in Understanding Fiction, these elements share a reciprocal relationship with setting

We marvel at the abilities of his narrators to describe nature, and, at the same time, we note that they are

1. Brunvand, "Honey," p. 134.

2. Lauber, "A Western Classic," p. 85.

3. Brooks and Warren, Understanding, p. 648. 160 characterized by that which they stress and by their tone.

Furthermore, it can be safely said, Davis reveals his deep affection for the land through these spokesmen. We are awed by his knowledge and moved by his sincerity.

In order to understand fully the physical sense of place that derives from Davis' ability to immerse the reader in impressively convincing surroundings, one must scrutinize his various uses of nature. Davis employs nature in the following ways: (1) as a teacher; (2) as a provider; (3) as a test; (4) as an active, threatening force; (5) as a refuge, an idyllic place to escape to, a healing power;

(6) as a source of contrast with the sleazy towns; (7) as a source of beauty worthy of celebration; and (8) as a poetic symbol.

First of all, Davis stresses that man can learn from the observation of nature. In the essay entitled "A Walk in the Woods" in Kettle of Fire, Davis pointed out that looking at a pool of mountain water reveals, at first, only a flat reflection of the world around it, but upon looking more closely, one can see myriad forms of underwater life (KF, p. 72). This is, he believes, a parable because most people should be instructed to look beyond the surface reflection they see of others or the superficial view they have of issues. They should peer closely in order to study what lies beneath the surface. Davis himself illustrated the folly of judging by outer impressions when he disparaged 161 a man who, it seemed, did not take proper care of his property. This man, though, as it turned out, was blind and, therefore, he could not clean the grounds near his house (KF, p. 74). Another, more effective illustration of the same point occurs in Winds of Morning when Amos Clarke, the narrator, compares gazing into a desert waterhole with

"Exploring into the real ins and outs of a community ..."

(WM, p. 44). In this example Davis shows how nature can teach us to be more wary of other people's motives because

Clarke should have looked closely at the inner workings of the community to realize that the jury intended to acquit

Busick since they wanted him free to repay them for his debts. Occurring as it does at the beginning of the novel, this incident serves two additional purposes: it deepens

Clarke's antipathy toward community corruption, and, at the same time, it reflects his deepening faith and trust in nature.

Another significant thematic way in which nature functions as a teacher occurs in Honey in the Horn when

Clay watches a clever coyote herd a sheep to its death by forcing it to run away from the camp in increasingly wider circles. Davis remarks that Clay "learned a couple or three things about the power of intelligence over instinct that stood him in hand a good many times afterward, not merely in handling animals, but in looking out for himself"

(HH, p. 32). In effect, the incident teaches young Clay to 162 respect every creature's intelligence and to call upon his own reason and intelligence to temper or to counter his immediate instinctual responses. Thus, instead of running away from Luce when he realizes that she killed two men, he considers the circumstances, their love for each other, the nature of his own crimes, and then he decides to reunite with her.

The second use of nature, as a provider, is illus­ trated in each of the five novels and by several of the essays and short stories. Davis points out nature's pro­ visional quality when writing about the mid-nineteenth century West or about the modern West. He is convinced that no one would starve if he recognizes that food is available. Therefore, each person must attune his wants to that which nature provides. Perhaps the most effective example of this idea occurs in Harp of a Thousand Strings when Robinette and Jory, faced with starvation, come to realize that they are surrounded by edible plants.

In the epigraph to Honey in the Horn, Davis quotes a line from a song stating, "balance to your partner, honey in the horn," a metaphorical admonition that one must balance or adjust to his partner or natural environment.

Man, Davis points out, must pursue realistic, moderate desires in order to find satisfaction throughout his life.

Nature provides the honey, that is, the much sought after necessities and luxuries of life. Two other novels, Beulah 163

Land and The Distant Music, also contribute to our under­ standing of this idea. In Beulah Land the migratory Warne group adapts well to Lhat which nature provides. They use layers of leaves to keep themselves warm at night; they eat fruits and berries that grow near the trails; and they cut down nearby trees in order to construct a solid river raft.

They balance to their partner by utilizing to their advantage the most accessible foods and materials. Ruhama and Askwani also balance to their partner by shunning the pursuit of the enticing but unattainable mythical white buffalo, and they chose, instead, the rigors and rewards of a family farm life in Oregon. In The Distant Music Lydia's long speech in the final chapter makes a similar point because she reminds Old Ranse that he must continue to accommodate to the changes in his partner, nature.

Davis* third use of nature and one found throughout his work is the idea that nature may serve as a violent force which severely tests a person's determination and strength. Perhaps the most effective examples of this idea are found in the short stories, most notably in "The Kettle of Fire," "Open Winter," and "The Homestead Orchard." In each story a character must make a journey from one place to another while enduring hardships that stem partially from the harsh environment. In "The Kettle of Fire" Young Capron travels several miles through desert and scrub-brush country in order to bring a kettle of fire to the wagon train with 164 which he had been- traveling. Capron has to continue to

travel through rugged areas while carrying and feeding a fire and while watching out for the men whose partner he killed. Furthermore, sage-rats, owls, and hundreds of jackrabbits eerily accompany him and accent his fears of isolation. Undoubtedly, the experience which most disgusts him occurs when he comes upon flocks of wild geese: Of all the forms of life the country had put him up against, they were the worst. They held their ground till he could have reached down and touched them, and then rose with a horrible blast of screeching and banging of wings, darkening the sky overhead and spattering him and the pony and the kettle and the fire in it with filth to show how much he had upset them by turning out to be something they had not been expecting. Then, as the next flock went squalling and clattering up with a new shower, the one behind him settled back onto the grass as unconcernedly as if nothing at all had happened, as, no doubt, in the tablets of their memory, nothing at all had.

They should have quieted down and gone back to resting when he dismounted and went to work pre­ paring the dead willow limbs for his fire, but they seemed unable either to stand him or to let him alone. Every few minutes, though he moved as little as he could and the pony scarcely stirred out of its tracks, some of them would stalk close to him, rear up and look him over again, and then let out a horrified squawk and put the whole flock up to spatter him with filth all over again. It was not hostility as much as indignation. They were outraged with him for being there, without having the ghost of an idea what he was doing or the slightest interest in finding out (KF, p. 184).

He endures the rigorous trek as well as the menacing animals

to discover that, as he returns to the camp, his values

have been reversed by the experience: 165

It was humiliating to realize that his values had all been turned upside down, when he could welcome seeing a dead horse with buzzards around it and be downcast to think that people he knew might be keeping warm and cooking food and drying out their gunpowder, but the fear held on in spite of him (KF, p. 187).

When Capron concludes that exacting, personally rewarding trials no longer exist, the narrator disagrees and states that there will always be "the fire to bring home, through the same hardships and doubts and adversities of one's life that make up the triumph of having lived it" (KF, p. 189).

In "Open Winter" Beech comes to a similar conclusion after herding horses from the open country into town. And in

"The Homestead Orchard" Linus is cheered by his realization that the orchard that he labored over years earlier was still alive. He is moved to discover that his earlier efforts blossomed and bore fruit "through all the tangle of dead and broken and mutilated limbs that showed how hard it had been to live at all" (TB, p. 111).

Closely related to Davis' use of nature as a test is his use of nature as an active, threatening force. For example, the migrants in Honey in the Horn, nearing Coos

Bay, are battered by a hurricane, "nature's final attempt to bring them down," which they battle admirably (HH, p. 288).

They interpret the hurricane as a manifestation of nature's hostility toward them. But the most vivid example of nature's destructive power occurs in Beulah Land. Human eyes cannot penetrate the treacherous darkness. Ruhama and 166

Askwani happen upon increasingly sinister scenes which undermine their confidence in nature: a field in which lie scattered decapitated wild turkeys, and a dead wolf, shunned by buzzards, with no visible signs as to the cause of death. Wolves stealing through the darkness around her tent menace Ruhama. Later she is frightened by the stench of millions of pigeons and by the burning red eyes of thousands of predatory creatures near her tent during the night. As day dawns Ruhama feels that nature has betrayed her. Refusing to trust blindly in nature, she recognizes

"the peace and restfulness of wild nature profaned and made hideous by wild nature's greed and gluttony and ferocity

..." (BL, p. 239).

An additional way in which Davis uses nature is by presenting it as a refuge, a place where one can escape from others. Immersing oneself in nature may calm a person by restoring his sense of personal equilibrium or balance.

Nature may even initiate a process of personal healing and reinvigoration. We know, of course, that Turner posited a similar romantic interpretation of nature as a constant source of rejuvenation. Winds of Morning deals at length with this concept. Amos Clarke is disgusted, in general, with humanity, and, in particular, with his Oregon neighbors.

He points out that the tone of 1926, the year in which the novel is set, sharply contrasts with the turn of the century, the period of Old Hendricks' youth. Nature is no 167

longer the insuperable barrier it once was. A shift has

occurred because in Old Hendricks' time people looked to

each other for reassurance and help while they viewed nature

as a hostile force, but in Clarke's time people look to

nature as a "reassuring refuge. . . . [and as] the great

healer," while regarding each other with suspicion (WM,

p. 272).

Natural surroundings, uncluttered by man or anything

manmade are a source of refreshment for Clarke's sorely

troubled spirit. While camping near an old orchard which

someone planted but has since abandoned, Clarke feels "a kind of deliverance" (WM, p. 154). He is reassured by his

realization that nature is reasserting itself in the form

of a dense tangle of vines and bushes. Furthermore,

nature is responsible for effecting a change in his charac­

ter and outlook. Two healing forces, Hendricks and nature,

help Clarke to overcome his bitter self-imposed isolation

and help him to readjust to society. Numerous references

in the final chapters to the changes in climate and topo­

graphy that accompany spring reflect the various personal

changes in Clarke's emotional state. Davis skillfully

connects both of the processes as Clarke, nearing Calanthe's

house, pauses to describe his surroundings:

Turning up the draw, I took one look back at the river, so as to remember how it had looked to a clear conscience. The sand dunes were dazzling white, fogged at the edges with sand blowing across 168

them. There were some red box cars on a railroad siding that flinched when the wind struck them broadside, and a play of light in the telegraph wires like a huge electric spark jumping back and forth across them. The river was black like wet slate, and the white caps breaking out on it tore into spray and went whipping away across the sand before they could move across the water at all. It was the way the first phase of our spring always ended—strong, harsh, not leaving any room for doubt that it really was ending (WM, pp. 342-343).

It is significant that Clarke uses the first person plural

pronoun "our" because it reflects his new-found acceptance

of brotherhood. It is entirely appropriate that just as the

spring winds blow away the first dead growths of spring to

make way for summer's rich blossoming, so then are the

assimilated words of Hendricks cleared out of his mind to

make room for a new beginning, the blossoming of his self­

hood in conjunction with his commitment to Calanthe.

Another way in which Davis employs nature to

further thematic concerns is by contrasting nature with the

towns. This point is best illustrated by Amos Clarke and

Old Hendricks in Winds of Morning. Clarke notes the urban

ugliness of dilapidated houses, tacky businesses, junked

automobiles and machinery. His casLigation of the town

environment takes on a moral tone as he describes the

town's center of activity, a prostitutes' "hookshop" (WM,

p. 183). He feels uneasy in the town because its corrup­

tion and physical decay reinforce his fear that pioneer

promise has dissipated. As a railroad detective watches 169 an illegal crap game transpire in the depot, Clarke notes

that the presence there of one woman in particular, Dodie

Thorbourne, epitomizes the pervasive mood of disappointment and failure:

She was from one of the country's old families; her parents' wedding had made town history twenty years back—wedding-dress from Paris, diamond clips for the bridesmaids, three preachers, all the trimmings. It hadn't turned out well; her parents had taken to quarreling and sometimes fighting, and she now to this (WM, p. 206).

Physically and emotionally repulsed by the setting and participants of the crap game, Clarke flees:

. . . the stench of railroad disinfectant; the clutch of floor dust and dried spittle; the weak old light bulbs frying scum from dirty hands on its hot glass; the players' faces like moldy bread, their fixed eyes like gouts of cold slime; a girl like that in the middle of it working as a capper for the shoddiest specimen among the whole pack of them, the filthiest, and having a good time at it {WM, p. 212).

Hendricks contributes to Clarke's indictment of the town by pronouncing that "even the flowers smells [sic] trashy" and that the town's old pioneers are merely senile cacklers whose glory is to recite the various ways in which their children satisfy their greed for money (WM, p. 226).

The descriptions of the towns, then, sharply contrast with

Clarke's lavish descriptions of nature and with his deep satisfaction derived from the invigorating open countryside.

He feels relieved as he rides out of the town because he can escape the townspeople's cheap sneers at his solitary efforts. In counterpoint to the misplaced values and 170 meaninglessness pervading the town, Clarke draws strength from noting the predictability of the seasonal changes, from his recognition of nature's ability to reassert itself, and from nature's unchanging, amoral stature.

Each novel contains numerous examples of Davis' ability to celebrate nature's beauty. Davis emphasizes his deep affection for his native West in these beautiful passages, the finest example of which is Lydia's speech at the end of The Distant Music. By weaving anecdotes, stories, and tall-tales into her description, she illustrates the way people in a certain place relate, embroider, and exaggerate experiences which create a body of myths that reflect man's mystical relationship with his land.

Yet the difficulty in defining man's spiritual relationship with a place prompted Davis to attempt, at times, to employ nature as a poetic symbol. In Beulah Land, for example, he refers to a place where rare, fabled white buffalo roam, a place "unmapped and unknown" because no one recognizes it as he passes by (BL, p. 242). Although every­ one yearns to find such a place, each person must realize that such a paradise is unattainable. In another sense,

Ruhama and Askwani do find the land of the v/hite buffalo or

Beulah Land because they find contentment and self-respect from working strenuously to accomplish moderate goals.

Davis pursued other methods in order to delineate man's emotional and spiritual sense of place. We must remember that he chose to write about a critically important period in American history--from the middle of the nineteenth century until approximately 1926--and a distinct area—our Western frontier as it gradually moved during this period from North Carolina to the Mississippi Valley and finally to the Oregon Territory. He chose this period and this place because he was fascinated by the American Western experience as people faced the closing of the frontier. As the Western population increased, resources and land came in shorter supply. As the land filled with settlers, people turned back to the areas previously passed over and continued to search them for the wealth that had eluded them so far. What kind of people were these second-generation

Westerners, the people who reclaimed and recovered the land?

How did they react to the loss of a "safety-valve" area where one could previously escape if life at home became intolerable or merely unfulfilling? The West had been viewed as a place that could always provide a new start or another chance to make one's fortune. It had been reassuring to know such opportunities existed. Yet some who came to the West found that they did not have the strength or desire to use the available land to their best advantage. Some exhausted the land's resources and spoiled the environment.

Others lost their ambition and became the victims of their own failings by becoming obsessed by personal excesses.

Some submitted to the land's brutalizat,ion. Others failed 172 because they were too greedy or short-sighted or stupid.

Some patiently continued to wait for another boom period.

Davis preferred to write about those who eked out modest livings, those who accepted frugality in the face of tremendous hardships, and those who recognized the personal significance of the ordeal. What qualities, Davis asked in the "Preface" to Kettle of Fire, link us with preceding generations of Americans (KF, pp. 17-18)? He looked back to a recent past and created characters whose lives give us insight into ourselves. He carefully selects events from the American past and presents these events as they are colored by his feelings and memory. Such material is not merely historical accounts because his memory and feeling coalse to produce factual and fictional interpretations of

Western history (KF, p. 15). Davis realized that he could create a unified impression by illuminating and dramatizing significant aspects of our past experience.

While laboring to construct a unified impression,

Davis discovered the significance of man's relationship with his land and the contribution it made to the American character. Eschewing the pessimism of many of the major twentieth century novelists, Davis, with Stegner, Horgan, and Guthrie, maintains hopefulness by showing how the pioneer experience crystallized certain characteristics we often view as quintessentially American. Turner provided us with a list of these characteristics; Davis dramatized 173

them. Therefore, in addition to illustrating flightiness,

directionlessness, and eccentricity, Davis dramatizes the

Westerner's most admirable qualities: determination, resiliency, generosity, recognition of the value of community, and a belief in upward mobility, all of which reflect historical reality. The essence of the Western experience for the mass of people was a grueling daily struggle. In his text entitled The Stream of American

Hi story Leland D. Baldwin describes the nature of most

people's lives in the West:

Success was not attained in the West merely by working and waiting. Red men were the least of the dangers. Even if the pioneer's chosen spot was fertile, it could be situated off the developing arteries of transportation, or lost in a law suit, or prove to be inescapably malarial. Disease, malnutril ion, exposure, and accident always plagued the pioneer. Few families failed to lose children; few men and women reached old age with the same spouse with whom they had begun adult life—and death, not divorce, was the great separater. Probably a minority of those who took up western land had reason to rejoice when they came to cast up life's balance, except for the one fact that their surviving children had a better start than they would have had in the East. Yes, the ordinary men and women of the West were heroic, but not in any dramatic sense. They lived (in the words of Thoreau) lives of quiet desperation. They were heroic because for a genera­ tion, perhaps all their lives, they doggedly fought adversity and monotony and forced both to yield a few grudging conveniences. They were tragic, also, not because they were smitten with sudden disaster but because through the years good crops and good prices seldom came together, because of the lengthening row of graves in the field beside the 174

cabin, and because the years bowed their shoulders without giving them their hearts' desires.^

Davis stresses that above all he respected those who endured, developed a resilient toughness, and learned the value of reconciliation and accommodation. Furthermore, the last two novels strike us as the most clearly relevant because here Davis focused on the individual's struggle to adjust to urban life and to adjust to the responsibilities of inherited land. At the same time, his celebrations of nature sound ominous because we know that our resources dwindle as the population increases.

Each novel contributes to our understanding of the ways in which people developed physical, emotional, and spiritual bonds with their land. I think this may also be called Davis' conception of an American land ethic. Momaday tells us that in order to form an American land ethic we must acknowledge and imitate the "man [who] looks at a given landscape and [who] takes possession of it in his blood and brains." 5 Momaday urges us to come to physical terms with our environment by being immediately aware of it through our senses. He asks that we become aware of and responsive to seasonal and yearly processes and changes. Finally, he

4. Leland D. Baldwin, The Stream of American History (New York: Richard R. Smith Publisher, 1952), p. 540.

5. Momaday, "An American," p. 10. 175 stresses the moral relationship we share with the land.^

Davis' work is a coming to terms with the world around us by examining our roots, our heritage, our land and our responses to that land. We are, to a great extent, that which we are. And by studying those who preceded us, we can learn much of ourselves. Probing behind his frequently ironic persona, we find that Davis was a moralist and a didactic historical realist whose smirking and sassy tone mask a puzzled but ultimately reassuring posture. Each novel ends on a tempered, triumphant note. Davis is firmly in the Western tradition that is hopeful and hopelessly

"square."^ At the end of Honey in the Horn Davis stated his conviction that only adversity can make some people snap out of their complacency in order to cooperate (HH, p. 507).

Davis' "squareness," a quality that aligns him with the Western regionalists, as well as other aspects of his fiction, places him within one of the mainstreams of

American literature. His varied, numerous uses of nature and landscape, the element of place, link him with the

Romantic and transcendental writers. For example, he selects significant details of natural background to serve as poetic symbols and in this way he employs a technique adopted by Thoreau when h^ writes of the pond in Walden

6. Momaday, "An American," pp. 10-11.

7. Stegner, "Born a Square," p. 48. 176 and Twain when he writes of the Mississippi River. As

Davis speaks of nature as a healing force and as a refuge we recall Ralph Waldo Emerson's words in the opening pages of Nature. And when Davis anthropomorphizes nature to create a vengeful, destructive being we are reminded of the threatening, brooding forests and landscapes in Hawthorne's works.

Davis belongs to the native American humor tradi­ tion because the wry, ironic persona he often dons freely indulges in exaggeration and boldly speaks in an un­ restrained, inventive Western dialect. His use of tall- t.ies and portraiture link him with the story-tellers of the Old Southwest.

Perhaps it is Davis' interest in character that contributes most significantly to his respected position in American literature. Several of his most important characters, including the narrator of "Old Man Isbell's

Wife," Pop Apling, Ruhama, Pop Hendricks, and Lydia Inman, remind us of Huck Finn because of their horse sense. Like

William Faulkner's Ratliff they exhibit healthy skepticism and shrewd understanding. In general, the people in Davis' works, like Twain's, are representative, a "type of the common folk, sample of the run-of-the mill democracy in 177 g America." Although several critics have pointed out different ways in which Twain seems to have influenced

Davis, the most accurate assessment was made by John

Lauber in a review of Honey in the Horn:

Davis' clearest debt is to Mark Twain. His style, with its rambling compound sentences, its free use of colloquialisms, its unsentimental and ironic tone, is highly suggestive of Huckleberry Finn, as is the character of Clay Calvert, like Huck an orphan and an outcast, and a clear-sighted observer of the illusions, stupidities and cruelties of the human race. The significant difference, of course, is that while Huck is primarily an observer, Clay is participant; while Huck, at the conclusion of his story, is preparing to flee from society again, Clay finally accepts it and is accepted by it.^

In "Open Winter" and Winds of Morning Davis sets up a dialectic between an impetuous young man and an experi­ enced, wiser older man, a relationship not unlike that shared by Huck and Jim. Both Davis and Twain were interested in the nature of the initiatory experience and use the experience to echo traditional values. For example, in "Open Winter" Beech follows Apling's advice and realizes how rewarding determined hard work can be, and in Winds

Clarke follows Hendricks' advice and example and realizes a great deal, including the value of love and community.

The fact that many of Davis' characters grow and learn while

8. Dixon Wector, "Mark Twain," Literary History of the United States; History, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al., 3rd ed., rev. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 931.

9. Lauber, "A Western Classic," p. 86. 178

somehow managing to struggle through a series of ordeals

aligns his work with that of another Westerner, John

Steinbeck, who also found humor and significance while

describing the lives of ordinary people and the drama of

the commonplace. I think Davis intended for his works to

serve as a tribute to the spirit of the American people,

and more than that, as a tribute to downtrodden but un­

defeated people everywhere.

Yet it is important to take careful note of the

darkest aspects of Davis' work. Clarke's cynicism is the fullest expression of the disgust exemplified by the numerous portraits of eccentric failures who are found throughout the other novels. As he probes the failures of the post-pioneer generation, we are reminded of similar assessments in the work of Willa Cather, most notably, in

The Professor's House. The suffering and disillusion in the fiction of these historical novelists is painfully real.

A melancholy feeling of disappointment pervades much of

Davis' work, accompanying his bitterness at the wasteful­ ness and stupidity of his fellow Americans. He castigates many people who were capable of contributing meaningfully to society but who accomplished little because they were too greedy or careless. At the same time, he portrays the dejection felt by many as they retraced and recovered the last remaining areas of open land and realized that the promise of the frontier had largely disappeared. 179

Perhaps it was this awareness of wasted lives and spent dreams that led c,,e critic to conclude that Honey in the Horn is a depiction of the hope of "the exploited to become the exploiters.""*"^ Another calls the same novel a portrait of an "arrested frontier" in which "the pioneer virtues of energy and optimism have dwindled to restless­ ness and discontent."^"'" Yet such harsh assessments fail to deal adequately with the lean lives of Clay and Luce, two young second-generation pioneers who have been "starved down" by adversity (HH, p. 508). They each make serious misjudgments that result in the deaths of others, and

Davis makes no attempt to excuse their crimes in that violent land. But he does show how they each eventually overcome their suspicious distrust in order to enter into the community as responsible contributors. For Luce, maturity accompanies her recognition that "her days of fighting all communities and belonging to none were about done with" (HH, p. 501). And for Clay, maturity accompanies his realization that he must reveal the truth about his criminal past so that their future relationship is one based on full acceptance of each other.

In response to the charge that the pioneer virtues have dwindled to restlessness, we must remember that the

10. Lauber, "A Western Classic," p. 85.

11. Kohler, "Davis," pp. 134-136. 180 constant movement in the novel reflects a hope that they can find a place where they can entertain realistic hopes of prospering. The Pringleville episode illustrates the

pioneers' shrewdness and recognition of the folly of delusions. Davis insists that the pioneer virtues of determination and hopeful energy are as deeply felt during

the homesteading period of 1906 to 1908 as they were fifty years earlier when those who came West were confronted by unlimited resources. At the conclusion to the novel Clay voices a hope for a burgeoning nation, a nation whose widespread shifting continues to this day, when he states:

I wanted to settle down in one place and stay there, and then I looked over the people that had. They're all right, but they don't amount to anything. These people do. If enough of 'em was to take to the road all at once, they could stand this country on its head. You can't tell what they might do (HH, p. 508).

Davis adds that "once enough of them had taken to the road all at once, and they had conquered half the continent"

(HH, p. 509). Clay's growing recognition of the value of determined efforts within the protean community of settlers gives Davis' novel a sense of direction that softens the

brunt of the wasted li^es of several of the other charac­ ters.

Davis' third novel, Beulah Land, echoes many of the concerns of Honey in the Horn. This panoramic view of the fluid American frontier follows the westward travels of a group of Indian and Anglo people. Such an expansive setting 181 could have proven disastrously diffuse had Davis not included two characters, Ruhama and Askwani, whose initiatory experiences add unity to the novel. The novel presents grim alternating series of movement and stasis episodes. As he did in Honey in the Horn, Davis places a young couple in a variety of situations that test their will and strength. Both novels depict the initiation and maturation of the individual couples, and both end on notes of promise.

Honey in the Horn and Beulah Land differ in that in the latter Davis seems to be following up Clay's sanguine prediction that the pioneers could "stand this country on its head" (HH, p. 508) by tracing the lives of Ruhama and

Askwani to their conclusions: they contributed to the settlement of the West and endured the misery resulting from epidemics, harsh climate and terrain, random violence, and human failings. Yet Beulah Land is much more than a travelogue of distress. As in Honey in the Horn Davis labors to show the necessity for people to recognize their limitations and to set moderate, realistic goals. Ruhama, the representative transient who is attached to no place in particular, realizes that Beulah Land is not strictly a geographical location, but, in addition, it is a place in the heart, a place where one cherishes memories of the shared struggle to survive, where the land is familiar and people are tolerant so that meaningful kinship may flourish. 182

After considering all of the harsh conditions of early

Western life, such a tempered, realistic assessment seems

the most intelligent response. We suspect that Ruhama and

Askwani are an attempt by Davis to continue and to conclude the search he initiated with Clay and Luce in Honey in the

Horn. In addition, Beulah Land illustrates the inevitable fusion of the Indian and Anglo bloods, the fact of upward social mobility, and the continued shifting of people from

East to West and back again that occurs to this day in a highly mobile nation.

Harp of a Thousand Strings, appearing in 1947, two years before Beulah Land, contributes little additional significant information in relation to Davis' American land ethic. By venturing into French history Davis illustrated one of the limitations of his talent because the bulk of the novel which is set in revolutionary France is lifeless and cumbersome, while the remainder of the novel set in America is glowingly alive.

Thematically, the novel shows how certain events and characters affected, although in a circuitous manner, the settlement of the American frontier. Thus Davis does accomplish his central goal which was to disprove historians who claim that American history is shallow. Davis shows that American history is inseparable from European history by focusing on the interaction of people who lived on each continent. He also succeeds in showing that the suffering 183 and destruction wrought by Madame Tallien, Crawford,

Robinette, and Jory, is counterbalanced by their contribu­ tions to the settling of the American West. Davis believes that man is continually moving forward but that often his progress is difficult to recognize. The novel attempts to reassure those who lose hope that even during one of man­ kind's most dismal eras, the bloody French Revolution, some made valuable contributions. It is entirely appropriate that Davis chose the American frontier as the backdrop against which to show how these contributions were effected because for him the West often symbolized possibility and a chance to vindicate earlier failings. In order to con­ tribute to the improvement of the world, Davis admonishes, man's spirit must be constantly informed and guided.

The last two novels, Winds of Morning and The

Distant Music, may be conveniently grouped together for several reasons. First of all, each grapples with problems in the modern West. As more and more people settled in the

West, and as it became apparent that the glamorous boom days had passed forever, people were forced to turn to each other, more than ever before, to find dignity and meaning in their lives. Realizing that they were never going to achieve any great historical feats or become wealthy, most people, Davis maintains, had to learn how to find signifi­ cance within the confines of their rather ordinary lives.

Therefore, in each of the last two novels he emphasizes the 184 spirit by which they accomplished the accommodation and reconciliation necessary in their lives.

Winds of Morning includes a dramatic reversal in which Amos Clarke eventually discards his cynicism and substitutes a tempered optimism. At first Clarke is obsessed by the differences between the glorious Western past and the tawdry Western present, between his invigorat­ ing experiences in the open country and the mediocrity and deadening routine in the towns, between the bold promise of the pioneers and the disappointing results of that promise.

Clarke vents his anger at the shabby, decaying towns, the widespread moral corruption, the lack of vision, the shoddy materialism, wasted land, ecological destruction, and the absence of meaningful challenges. But Pap Hendricks, who has led a full life and suffered disappointments that could have easily soured him, teaches Clarke, through his advice and example, that viable challenges remain in the modern

West. Hendricks forces Clarke to reexamine and reassess his dour opinions and, doing so, Clarke's hate eases and eventually disappears. Nature figures prominently in

Clarke's renewal because it is a constant, reassuring presence in his life and as the spring arrives he notes its own vital renewal process. Clarke's spirit is rejuvenated in an additional way as he recognizes and responds to

Calanthe's love. Winds of Morning, through the charac­ terizations of Clarke and Hendricks, illustrates the ways 185 in which a settled land may be enriched by those who recognize the value of balanced perspective while eschewing self-pity and cynicism.

The Distant Music, Davis' final novel, traces the lives of three generations of Oregonians, and details the halting growth of Clark's Landing. As in Winds of Morning, spirit is again a crucially important thematic concept. The novel suggests that a determined, informed personal spirit is essential to adjusting to life in the modern West. The first Ranse Mulock shows admirable determination but lacks the proper spirit because he is motivated by scorn and haughtiness. Still, he achieves success by settling the land and by initiating the Mulock-land bond that so deeply affects future generations of his family. His son, the second Ranse, develops the land but suffers crippling depression from a growing awareness of the ways the land exerts pressure on him and the ways it influences his personal decisions. The novel's climax resolves these personal problems for Ranse and forcefully posits prescrip­ tive advice for the generations that follow. Old Ranse, blind and hopeless, wanders over the countryside in order to see the land before he dies. As in "The Homestead

Winter" blindness is a metaphorical suggestion of an inability to recognize the truth, and Old Ranse can no longer see clearly because he is a victim of the "mirage country" whose spirits can dangerously mislead one and 186 distort reality (DM, p. 247). Old Ranse's desire to live, his animating spirit, is dying until Lydia Inman restores it by brilliantly calling to mind the beauty of the land as well as the emotional and physical bonds that exist between man and land. Davis understood that as the frontier disappeared, so disappeared much of the potential and many of the opportunities that had previously beckoned many westward. It is still easy to be blinded and deceived as was Ranse. But Lydia represents our hope for she recog­ nized u..d overcame dangerous feelings of personal worthless- ness and depression. For Ranse and Lydia as well as for us, always accompanying the responsibilities of inherited land are the problems of coping with others and ourselves while searching for a personally meaningful and fulfilling life­ style in a steadily changing, modernizing American West. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Davis

Davis, H. L. Beulah Land. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1949.

. "Cow-Town Widows," The American Mercury, December 1929, pp. 464-73.

The Distant Music. New York: Popular Library, 1957.

. Harp of a Thousand Strings. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1947.

. Honey in the Horn. New York: Avon Books, 1972.

. Kettle of Fire. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1959.

. "The Old Fashioned Land—Eastern Oregon," The Frontier, 9 (March 1929), 201-207.

. "A Pioneer Captain," American Mercury, 22 (February 1931), 149-59.

. Proud Riders and Other Poems. New York: Harper, 1942.

. "Status Rerum—Allegro Ma Non Troppo," The Frontier, 8 (March 1928), 70.

. Team Bells Woke Me and Other Stories. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1953.

"Wild Horse Siding," Colliers, 17 October 1931, pp. 14-15, 66.

. Winds of Morning. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1952.

187 188

Davis, H. L., and James Stevens. Status Rerum: A Manifesto Upon the Present Condition of Northwestern Litera­ ture Containing Several Near-Libelous Utterances Upon Persons in the Public Eye. The Dalles, Oregon: Printed privately, 1927.

Secondary Sources

Bain, Robert. H. L. Davis. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1974.

Baldwin, Leland D. The Stream of American History. New York: Richard R. Smith Publishers, 1952.

Basso, Hamilton. "The Great Open Spaces," The New Yorker, 4 June 1949, p. 84.

"Biq Land," rev. of Beulah Land. Time, 57 (7 January 1952), 90. Billington, Ray Allen. The^ Westward Movement in the United States. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1959.

. America's Frontier Heritage. Hinsdale, Illinois: Dryden Press, 1966.

Blair, Walter. Native American Humor. Scranton: Chandler Publishing Company, 1960.

Boynton, Percy H. The Rediscovery of the Frontier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931.

Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Fiction. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959.

Brunvand, Jan Harold. "Honey in the Horn and 'Acres of Clams': The Regional Fiction of H. L. Davis," Western American Literature, 2 (Summer 1967), 135-45.

Bryant, Paul T. "H. L. Davis: Viable Uses for the Past," Western American Literature, 3 (Spring 1968), 3-18.

Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim's Progress. Aylesbury, England: Penguin Books, 1965.

Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. "The Call of the Far Country," New York Times Book Review, 3 February 1957, p. 5. 189

Dobie, J. Frank. "The Writer and His Region," Southwest Review, 35 (Winter 1950), 81-87.

Durrell, Lawrence. Spirit of Place. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1969.

Etulain, Richard. "H. L. Davis: A Bibliographical Addendum," Western American Literature, 5 (Summer 1970), 129-35.

, Western American Literature: A Bibliography of Interpretive Books and Articles. Vermilion: Dakota, 1972.

Folsom, James K. The American Western Novel. New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1966.

Griener, Francis F. "Voice of the West: Harold L. Davis," Oregon Historical Quarterly, 66 (September 1965), 240-48.

Guthrie, A. B., Jr. "Robust, Earthy, Full of Kick," New York Times Book Review, 6 January 1952, p. 5.

. The Way West. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.

Haslam, Gerald W. , ed. Western Writing. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974.

Hilton, James. "A French Woman Remembered," New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, 2 November 1947, p. 4.

Hodgins, Francis E., Jr. "The Literary Emancipation of a Region." Diss. Michigan State University, 1957.

The Holy Bible. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, n.d.

Hubbell, Jay c. South and Southwest: Literary Essays and Reminiscences• Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1965.

Hughes, Riley. "More Books of the Week," The Commonweal, 23 January 1948, pp. 378-79.

Jenkins, Eli Seth. "H. L. Davis: A Critical Study." Diss. University of Southern California, 1960.

Jones, Howard Mumford. "Epic Innocence of the West," Saturday Review, 13 January 1952, p. 16. 190

Jones, Philip L. "The West of H. L. Davis," South Dakota Review, 6 (Winter 1968-69), 72-84.

Kellogg, George. "H. L. Davis: 1896-1960: A Bibliography," Texas Studies in Language and Literature, 5 (Summer 1963), 294-303.

Kohler, Dayton. "H. L. Davis: Writer in the West," College English, 14 (December 1952), 133-40.

Lauber, John. "A Western Classic: H. L. Davis' Honey in the Horn," The Western Humanities Review, 16 (Winter 1962), 85-86.

Lee, Everett S. "The Turner Thesis Re-Examined," American Quarterly, 13 (Spring 1961), 77-87. Rpt. in The West of the American People. Ed. Allan G. Bogue et al. Itasca, Illinois: F. E. Peacock, 1970, 21-25.

Lee, Robert Edson. From West to East: Studies in the Literature of the American West. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966.

Lillenas, Haider, ed. Glorious Gospel Hymns. Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, 1931.

Marshall, Margaret. "Notes by the Way," The Nation, 2 February 1952, p. 110.

McGrory, Mary. "Beulah Land," New York Times Book Review, 16 November 1947, p. 18.

Momaday, N. Scott. "An American Land Ethic," Sierra Club Bulletin, February 1970, pp. 8-11.

Morgan, Dale L. "Fusing Red and White Cultures," Saturday Review of Literature, 11 June 1949, pp. 15-26.

Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo, The Venetian. Tr. and ed. William Marsden. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1948.

Powers, Alfred. History of Oregon Literature. Portland: Metropolitan Press, 1935.

Rourke, Constance. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1959. 191 Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Stegner, Wallace. "Born a Square--The Westerner's Dilemma," The Atlantic Monthly, January 1964, pp. 46-50.

. The Sound of Mountain Water. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972.

. "History, Myth, and the Western Writer," Great Short Stories of the West. Ed. J. Golden Taylor. New York: Ballantine Books, 1973, 13-25.

. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1973.

Steinbeck, John. The Portable Steinbeck. Ed. Pascal Covici, Jr. New York: The Viking Press, 1971.

Stewart, George R. "The Regional Approach to Literature," College English, 9 (April 1948), 370-75.

Taylor, J. Golden, ed. Great Short Stories of the West. New York: Ballantine Books, 1973.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt, 1940.

Wector, Dixon. "Mark Twain," Literary History of the United States: History. Ed. Robert E. Spiller et al. 3rd ed., rev. New York: Macmillan, 1963, I, 917-39.

Welty, Eudora. Three Papers on Fiction. Northampton, Mass.: Metcalf, 1955.